Director Guillem Morales and writer Morgan Lloyd Malcolm came together to adapt her 2015 stage play The Wasp for the big screen and brilliantly utilize limitations we normally acclimate to a small Broadway production. The characters and their environments are kept to a minimum, allowing the atmosphere of Adam Janota Bzowski’s eerie and subtle score and the expert camera work of John Sorapure to be players within this story.
Together, these ingredients enable The Wasp to be a tension-filled thriller that peers into the human psyche’s deeper, darker, and animalistic impulses. Everything works in sync to push the captivating performances of actresses Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer to convey things through well-placed dialogue and exposition. In the first moments of The Wasp, one of the film’s main characters, Heather (Harris), is seen trapping one of these insects along the windowsill of her lavish England home amongst a graveyard of deceased stinger siblings. The house has an infestation issue, but her husband, Simon (Dominic Allburn), isn’t too eager to handle the problem.
He’s thoroughly checked out where Heather’s anxieties are washing over her. How did things get so bad that this couple can’t even come together to handle a simple pest problem on a united front? This specific issue is a tiny piece of The Wasp‘s Alfred Hitchcock-inspired three-character puzzle, which touches on many topics such as revenge, premeditation, and privilege. There is never a time when you feel that ideas are fighting for space. If anything, this film is paced so well that it will leave you wanting more.
The Wasp / Natalie Dormer, Naomie Harris. Photo Credit: Shout! Studios
Wasps are tiny enough to swat and discard out of a window, but you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of an aggressive sting. Morales plays with this duality and utilizes the buzzing of the wasps like the pulsing floorboards in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story, The Tell-Tale Heart. Heather feels trapped in a neverending cycle of malaise in her relationship with nothing to fixate on but a bug problem that’s getting worse by the day. There are indications Heather and Simon are unable to have children (despite her desire to), and Simon himself works long nights at the office. Is there a way out for Heather? That may lie within the audacity of an old elementary school friend, Carla (Dormer).
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While Heather is well off, Carla is struggling to make ends meet. She works at a grocery store supporting four children (with a fifth on the way) and is looking for relief. Despite not being in contact for years, Carla receives a text from Heather urgently asking them to meet the next day. Getting over the awkwardness of trying to catch up with one another, Heather provides Carla with a way out of her endless debt troubles. The proposition is extreme — Heather asks Carla to kill her husband for a significant sum of money.
This is where Morales and Malcolm show their expertise together with The Wasp’s intriguing psychological aspects of the story. How would you react if somebody from your past asked for such a violent action from you and thought that you wouldn’t even flinch at doing it? Worst of all, what if you feel like you couldn’t turn it down because of the circumstances life has given you? These factors swirl around Harris and Dormer’s characters and are only deepened by the quick flashbacks of Heather and Carla’s past together. In one recurring flashback, a young Heather and Carla (played by Leah Modesir-Simmonds and Olivia Juno Cleverley) see a badly injured pigeon. Carla doesn’t think twice about putting out its misery. That quick judgment had stuck with Heather this whole time, and it just so happened that Carla’s circumstances led to this particular moment.
However, when the two women discuss how Carla should carry out the caper, the line begins to blur about who is predator and prey (it’s best that I don’t spoil). For a film mainly confined to a few rooms at a time (with some outdoor scenes sprinkled here and there), The Wasp never loses its spark. You can credit the captivating performances from Harris and Dormer together, which touch on various themes from class entitlement and childhood trauma to where you only need to hear their words to paint a complete picture of their entangled pasts and why they are in front of one another at this exact point.
Morales pairs the speed of the second and third acts, and the relentless reveals will keep the viewers on their toes and take their breath away as the final credits role. As we’ve seen in previous psychological thrillers, murder plots are already tricky enough to pull off — considering all the loose ends and alibis, you must keep airtight. To its credit, The Wasp uses that simplification to its advantage and shows the film has much more to offer.
