On demand: "Emily the Criminal"

Aubrey Plaza has been so good in the background of so many things in the years since Parks & Recreation that she deserves a film that repositions her front and centre. Even so, the straight-to-streaming Emily the Criminal presents as an interesting career choice: an unpredictable, faintly Soderberghian run around the lower rungs of L.A.'s gig economy, written and directed by John Patton Ford, in which Plaza plays a caterer and aspirant illustrator drawn into credit-card fraud as a means of paying off her student debts. In the pre-streaming era, Ford's film might have been miscategorised as an action-thriller in your local videostore, but it's something different, underpinned at every turn by a surprisingly deep understanding of capital, labour and business practice. Emily shifts sideways, from an economy in which she has no rights to one in which she still has no rights but a far greater chance of making big money for her troubles. It's all just moving stuff around; it's just that certain products pay better than slinging salads, that's all. We can see her logic, which is why we're willing to go along with her as she transitions from legit business to the criminal underworld, yet we also spot the risks that follow from ripping folks off for a living. These, finally, may be all that stands between us and following Emily down much the same career path.

Ford has a great sense of character, and a quiet, assured way of ramping up tensions. Everything here is headed towards one last job - genre business as usual - but we're not following the straight line of most actioners so much as a steep learning curve; we're left to walk in the footsteps of a heroine who visibly toughens up, trading in the pepper spray she nervily fingers upon first crossing the criminal threshold for a taser and some of Plaza's old April Ludgate attitude. Her progress is laid out, coolly but not dispassionately, as a balance sheet of gains and losses. Gains include a handsome, attentive suitor who also happens to be Scammer #1 (nice work from Theo Rossi, fleshing out the thumbnail Ford hands him with hopes and dreams of his own). They also include a newfound self-confidence: indeed, a big part of the quiet thrill of Emily the Criminal is watching Aubrey Plaza stand up for herself - going toe-to-toe with Gina Gershon, to cite one example - rather than slumping listlessly behind a desk. One more thing the movie understands: how capitalism makes more folks angry than it does rich. Losses include any residual taste for the conventional nine-to-five, be that am or pm, and some form of personal security, although - again - Ford's plotting is smart indeed in its suggestion that a gig worker like Emily may actually have very little in the way of personal security to lose. As a director, Ford is big on atmosphere, the ambient wash of Nathan Halpern's score recalling Elliot Goldenthal's hall-of-fame work on 1995's Heat in places - but unlike Michael Mann, whose work has always tended towards the grandiose, Ford gets us and his characters in and out within a tight ninety minutes. A stealthy, insinuating debut - distinctive in its adherence to a recognisably classical Hollywood style - from a filmmaker we should keep an eye on going forwards.

Emily the Criminal is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.