Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Lulu Wilson, Kevin James, Joel McHale, Robert Maillet, Amanda Brugel, Isaiah Rockcliffe, Ryan McDonald, James McDougall, Leslie Adlam, Justin Holiday, Mike Dara, Charles Boyland, Bryan Edwards, Andrew Siwik, Chandra Michaels, Gage Graham-Arbuthnot, John D. Hickman, Markus Radan, Kaleb Young, Ric Garcia.

Is the psychopath or the killer created or are they born? The psychoanalysts’ nightmare scenario is that they cannot distinguish between the states of mind that either drive someone to kill based on the actions they encountered or been beaten by, or whether it is truly, disturbingly, inherent in the human subconscious to the point where any youth can mask such feelings of behaviour by society putting it down to associated teenage angst and torment.

There has been an abundance of films that deal with the subject of the teenage killer, and quite often, as perhaps society expects, they highlight the disaffected loner, the boy with the problem with authority, the teenage lad to whom sex has become a weapon. However, it is not only boys who kill, girls are more than capable also of committing the most grievous of crimes, and yet we don’t talk about that, so when it happens it is seen more of an aberration, an inversion of how we see women as the caring, compassionate side of humanity.

The female teenage killer is even more shocking than the older woman who perhaps has snapped under the weight of years of abuse and condescension, and as the film Becky goes at great lengths to demonstrate the gradual slide in mental understanding of the difference between right and wrong is only exacerbated by the murderer’s will and belief in how they respond to the danger they face.

Killing in self-preservation is an accepted defence, killing out of malice, with enjoyment, even when attempting to save your own life, is a step that is not only frowned upon, is tapping into that silence of the psychopath which hides behind the façade of vulnerability. Becky understands that, and the direction and the writing subtly weave it in by making a home invasion/burglary by a group professing an admiration for the sickening Nazi ideal seem the most fearsome time in which a young woman would rightly fear for her life, but then inverting it so the filth of political ideology becomes the one trapped by her rage.

It is in that rage that Lulu Wilson as Becky truly frames the moment when the psychopath comes out of the cold, the blankness of the act replaced by a near euphoria, of rejoice, and it is blood curdling and frightening to witness.

In a departure for Kevin James, to perform a role which requires inhabiting the ideology of evil, is a refreshing change, and when on screen with Lulu Wilson, the dynamic of evil becomes overwhelming, the burden of innocence shattered, and those that hover in between the two mindsets, as shown expertly by Robert Maillet in the role of the reluctant criminal Apex, are also dispatched with unrepentant ease.

Becky is a decent inversion of the trope, proof, if it were required, that murder, of the psychopathic rage, are not confined to the troubled boy, but in an act of equality, can be utilised with even greater and deadlier force by the female of the species.

Ian D. Hall