HABIT
Directed by: Janell Shirtcliff
Starring: Bella Thorne, Andreja Pejic, Gavin Rossdale, Libby Minz, Josie Ho
Mads, Addy and Evie are three party girls in Los Angeles. When the drugs they're meant to be selling get stolen, the trio disguise themselves as nuns to hide from the vicious drug queen on their tail…
Janell Shirtcliff's first feature has a great look to it, it’s a pity the script isn't as fresh as it thinks it is.
What keeps you focus throughout the film is Bella Thorne as Mads. Ever since she was a young girl, Mads has had a fixation on Jesus and is constantly trying to achieve a euphoric state she experienced when younger. She keeps having anonymous sex in the hope of getting pregnant by the grace of God and raising her child as the new Messiah.
She and her two friends, sisters Addy and Evie, start working at a decadent nightclub selling drugs but she doesn't have a good night of it, having a bad reaction to the ecstasy tablet she took. The next morning, some random guy Evie took home with her walks out the door with their stash…
The middleman is Eric (Rossdale) a British washed up actor who has a bad coke habit but is basically toothless when it comes to violent confrontations. He's neither a match for Mads nor Queenie, the crazy drug queen.
There are elements of this script which feel like its riffing off of True Romance. It has a similar feel of amateurs in over their head and certain beats play out differently than you might expect. However there is one moment in particular which has fast become a cliché and whenever I come across it now it takes me out of the film.
When Queenie catches up with Eric, she starts in on this monologue about a nasty species of wasp. Its one of those things which a) makes the bad-guy seem more learned than they first appear, b) seem to be not related to what is happening but then dovetails back into the victim's predicament. However these speeches always make me wonder how much time these people spend practicing these monologues. To get the right pauses, the right emphasis on words.
Visually, Habit is stunning. The cinematography, shot composition, editing and colour schemes all work together and help the film to stand out from other off-kilter crime films. The soundtrack is also really good, at one point utlising Duran Duran's classic B-side, The Chauffeur, which is a big plus in my book,
THE VERDICT
The script by Libby Minz and Janell Shirtcliff feels like it was written thirty years ago when everyone was trying to out-Tarantino Tarantino. It has a pretty timeless feel to it (mobile phones turn up a couple of times but the cars, houses and wardrobes are of a different era altogether), the technical aspects to the film are all great and there is a spot-on performance by Bella Thorne in the central role. Its just the idea of monologuing bad-guys feels very ordinary.