Netflix's I Care A Lot takes what amounts to a horror story and tells it from the point of view of the villain, Marla Grayson, played by Rosamund Pike.
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Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), who is at the center of the slick, darkly comic caper flick, I Care A Lot is one shady lady. She comes off as caring, but watch out! she is crafty. Marla may be a court-appointed legal guardian for the elderly, but she swindles her wards out of their homes and income. She even has a discreet network of accomplices who assist her.
Just watching Marla exhale smoke from vaping suggests she is the devil incarnate, and Pike embraces her devious character with the same ruthlessness as she embraced her Oscar-nominated role in Gone Girl. Marla even says in the film s opening voiceover, Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people to keep the rest of us poor. She is a self-proclaimed lioness not a lamb. She schemes because she has been poor and knows that being rich is better.
Frankly, the playbook for success in America sucks. You’ve heard it before: eat or be eaten, hustle hustle hustle, move like a shark, the competition is working while you’re sleeping. This is, to use the term loosely, sociopathic which is why it’s such fertile territory for cinematic villains like
American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. In the new Netflix thriller
I Care A Lot, writer-director J Blakeson introduces us to another: Marla Grayson.
Marla (Rosamund Pike) is a fully-formed monster of a well-mannered and respectable sort. She’s a con artist who specializes in separating the elderly from their wealth. She also has an efficient system: a doctor who will declare targets unfit to manage their own affairs, a practiced courtroom spiel that tells judges what they need to hear so they’ll appoint her as her latest target’s legal guardian, and a favorite retirement home that appreciates all the business she sends their way.