[Fantasia 2020 Review] Lucky is a Stunning Piece of High Concept Filmmaking

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence’”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote those words in his book The Gay Science in reference to a concept of The Eternal Return. No, no, don’t run away. I promise this will be one of the only times I talk about Nietzsche in this review. The Eternal Return is a concept of viewing the world as an unending cycle and that in order to be at peace with this, you must say “yes” to suffering. Profess amor fati and embrace or love fate. Basically, to become a “yes-sayer” and accept an uncompromising understanding and acceptance of fate as an immovable object. Or, conversely, in the words of Lucky’s self-help guru May (Brea Grant): “Unless we face our fears and confront those unhealthy patterns that are holding us back we will get nowhere.

“No one is helped who can’t help themselves.”

May is having a tough time. A self-help writer and guru, she’s only as good to her publisher as her latest catch phrases and buzzwords are to the public. And her latest book isn’t selling as well as expected. Her home life is also on a slippery slope as she tries to work through a rough patch with her philosophy professor husband Ted (Dhruv Uday Singh). With book sales not where they need to be, she suggests taking a pause on writing for a bit to focus on their relationship. It’s a subject that doesn’t seem to sit well with Ted and he quickly changes the subject by touching her ankle with his ice-cream-cold hands.

That night, May’s awakened by the sound of breaking glass and when she goes investigate, she discovers The Man. He stands outside her window, face partially obscured by one of those semi-clear, plastic masks that blur facial features. But while his face is ambiguous, his intent is not: he has a knife. She races to wake her husband and he nonchalantly tells her that’s The Man. She’s as confused as we are so Ted sighs, grabs a golf club and lays down the startling clarification:

“The man who comes every night to kill us.”

Turns out this isn’t the first time this has happened. It happens every night. The same routine. The Man breaks in, May fights him off—kills him, even—and then the body vanishes. Cops show up. Take their notes. Tell her how lucky she is. Promise to do something. Rinse. Repeat. Over and over. Different days, sometimes different cops but always the same responses. The same questions. 

Let’s just get this out of the way: Lucky might be my favorite film of Fantasia 2020. The script by Brea Grant is so high concept while utilizing the slasher tropes of the unstoppable and implacable villain. The Man never speaks, but moves with the ongoing determinism of a robot, as if willed to move continually towards its target. Nietzsche would call it a representation of fate. In cinema terms, he’s a literal It Follows monster that has one singular object of desire. But those tropes and what the script does with them is what makes the narrative so high concept as the unkillable slasher becomes a philosophic metaphor for the cyclical nature of trauma.  

No one takes May’s concerns seriously; a problem that’s compounded when her husband goes missing and everyone wants to focus on her husband rather than the true issue. May’s days and nights become an unending cycle of preparing for the trauma, facing the trauma and then being told platitudes and buzz words: stay calm and vigilant. And when she tells them she’s not in danger with her husband, but The Man who keeps coming to her house every night, the police officers nod and say, “Hmm. OK. Anything else?”

Director Natasha Kermani complements the script with a vicious touch, completely unseating the viewer and expectations through the use of off-putting audio choices and constantly tilting camera angles. Like May, the audience is unsettled and grasping at straws to somehow make sense of the nightmare situation unfolding every night. Kermani’s eye for mixing story and action truly sells the high concept direction the script takes and augments it with with glints of visual dark humor, particularly as May becomes increasingly gifted with her nightly battles. For awhile, the “help yourself queen” truly does embrace the amor fati of the situation and throws herself into her cyclical patterns. This version of embracing fate just happens to include rope, duct tape, a bat and some mace…

No matter how weird the narrative gets, it’s anchored by a world class performance by Brea. While she impressed in this year’s After Midnight, she truly brings a mix of confusion, horror, vulnerability and can-do frustration to her role that makes May feel relatable and real, even as the situation becomes increasingly detached from reality. It might be her finest and bravest performance. Coupled with her script and its searing critiques, it’s obviously her most personal.

I was anxious the entire movie partly because the narrative kept me unbalanced, but also partly because it’s such a high concept thriller that I was afraid it would whiff the ending. And, reader: It doesn’t. It nails the landing. And then takes a little bow because it’s so self-assured and confident. 

Lucky left me with so many feelings. I thought about the way the word “lucky” can demean the work someone put so much effort into. More importantly, I found myself thinking back over the last few years as many brave women came forward with reports of abuse and how even the title “Lucky” comes with caveats. That it continues to support a certain kind of status quo we’ve seen somewhat uprooted by buzzwordy revelations like #MeToo.

All of this is subtly explored in Lucky, wrapped in genre and sci-fi goodness. It’s a smart movie that has something to say while also allowing Brea Grant to kick some ass. Going back to that Nietzsche quote, it feels like we have been living in a kind of “eternal return” or amor fati. That by ignoring the abuses, we have created that fatalistic cycle that continues to be perpetuated because we embraced it as the only option. While on the micro level, people every day are forced to embrace their trauma, even as it cycles over and over in a terrible eternal return of its own. That kind of amor fati is an ouroboros that continues to perpetuate behavior with no consequences. It reinforces a belief that we shouldn’t be idealistic that things could get better—after all, in Nietzsche’s words, “idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary”—and that by accepting and embracing that unending cycle of life we actually continue to affirm it. 

Well, as May would say: Fuck Nietzsche. We have work to do.