Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Emily the Criminal.

The list of movies that shake their fists at capitalism is practically endless. And the majority of them pit the economic structure as Goliath against a fundamentally good protagonist usually failing to play David. The main character often begins the film burdened with financial struggles and lacks the take-no-prisoners mentality to succeed in a dog-eat-dog environment, and ends up getting crushed by the weight of their world. Or perhaps our virtuous protagonist gets seduced by the evils of capitalism, with the lust for success and material excess overpowering the righteous traits they possessed at the film's beginning. Emily the Criminal takes a different approach, an approach pushed by a thought that is perhaps difficult for some people to stomach. First-time director writer/director John Patton Ford seems to think some people are just bad. Their calamities don't come from corruption, but from something ingrained in their bones that has been there all along. The critique of capitalism in Emily the Criminal is that it pushes a rotten person to realize a true nature that would have stayed dormant if the need for money weren't so overwhelming.

emily-the-criminal-aubrey-plaza
Image via Sundance

Despite how it unfurls as a no-nonsense psychological thriller, Emily the Criminal still has anti-capitalist sentiment at its core. Emily is an art-school dropout who is struggling to pay student loan debt and rent, and failing in her search for a worthwhile career. Its such a blueprinted struggles-of-capitalism protagonist that you would expect her to be played by Greta Gerwig. But the casting of Aubrey Plaza ends up being a brilliant move by Ford and company. Perhaps no other actress in Hollywood toes the line between stoic and demonic as well as the former Parks and Rec star. Uncertainty from the audience is what keeps the tension so taut because Emily doesn't really change as a character throughout the movie. Instead, she has a somewhat inverted arc of self-realization.

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Is Emily Bad From the Beginning?

The film begins by creating the incredibly convincing illusion that Emily is a good person. Each moment that hints at her inner vileness is presented as dismissible. The way she derails a job interview in the opening scene feels completely justified. The interviewer plays a perverted cat and mouse game as he tiptoes around knowing about a felony conviction that he found during a background check. It's a crime that is presented as a product of her past life, something that she has since grown from and become more estimable. Because the crime happens prior to the movie starting, the audience is inclined to feel sympathy for Emily, thinking that the current issue she's facing is that society is not allowing her to let bygones be bygones. While back at her own job as a food catering deliverer, she covers the shift of one of her coworkers who has to take his son to baseball practice, showcasing a side of compassion that the audience can keep referencing when her nobility appears to tremble.

Theo Rossi and Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal
Image via WKPR

Emily's desperate need for money leads her to an opportunity where she's told she can make a quick $200, but the constant "just go and see" answer offered every time she asks for specifics implies that it must be shady. Indeed, it's a credit card fraud scheme run by a man named Youcef (Theo Rossi), which involves Emily paying for a TV with stolen credit card info. The audience still sees themselves in her shoes when she attempts to leave before her feet become shackled. When Youcef stops her as she's heading out the door and asks why she's leaving, it seems that her feeling of entrapment is the only reason she replies by saying she can't know whether the scam will work, and she appears to be unwilling as she's roped back into going through with the theft. Every excuse she gives for a questionable action is not only easily justifiable, but it hardly crosses the audience's mind that she could be anything else other than an unfortunate woman thrust into suffocating and unforgiving circumstances.

How a Life of Crime Starts

Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal
Image via Roadshow Attractions

Emily is pushed into her life of crime out of a desperation that capitalism has caused. It is unforgiving to those on the path to redemption. One single mistake leaves Emily playing a game of catchup that she can't possibly win, so she decides to break the rules. She understands that this new crime is theft, not only from the store but from real people whose hard fought dollars are being swiped, but she has been pushed to the point where she doesn't feel like there is a better option. Her crime doesn't seem like an effort to completely cheat the system. It appears that Emily is just trying to get back to the point where she has a fighting chance. But every expression on Plaza's face is slippery, the perceived looks of exhaustion slowly begin to be understood as ones of wickedness as her true nature starts to peek around the corner.

Despite an increased sense of danger and immorality, Emily forges ahead in her burgeoning life of crime. She goes on more runs for Youcef, then has him teach her the ropes of the trade so that she can start an operation of her own. She is the recipient of multiple acts of violence and a threat on her life as she continues down a bleak road, going much further than any audience member would venture. But the most alarming thing is that she could stop at any time. The criminal endeavor she has chosen is one that she could escape from whenever she wants. There are no threats of violent repercussions, no boss forcing her to keep working. As Youcef says upon Emily's first time meeting him, "If you want to go, there is the door," and that door stays open the entire film. It's not any tangible force or logical desire that keeps her chained to the criminal underworld, but a perverse craving of the life she's been inducted into. The nightmares of capitalism pushed her down the rabbit hole, but it's her pleasure to keep burrowing further despite a rope hanging by her side that she could use to climb out. And eventually the audience realizes that the title of the movie doesn't refer to her job. It refers to her essence.

Emily Doesn't Start to Go Bad — She's Bad All Along

Aubrey Plaza as Emily the Criminal
Image via Roadside Attractions

Everything first perceived as forgivable starts to be reevaluated and repeated with different connotations. Near the end of the movie, she is awarded an interview at an ad agency where her friend works. The interviewer is aware of her past felony, and appears to look past it and attempt to evaluate Emily's character. Upon hearing that the position would be an unpaid internship, Emily blows up in a very similar fashion to the opening interview. But this time, the audience views her outburst of one of true malice. Though the internship is unpaid, it would culminate in a potential job offer in five months if her work was up to par. Through her credit card fraud spree, she had amassed more than enough wealth to get by for those months, enough that hard work would be her only obstacle in attaining an admirable career. The path laid at her feet isn't an easy one to walk, but it's one that so many people have traveled to make their lives livable.

Yet Emily, never oblivious to the damage that her criminal ventures inflict, chooses to explode at the woman who is offering her the chance for an honest life, unmasking the delinquency that had been hidden under her stone-cold expression all along. Emily also eventually divulges the specifics of the felony charge repeatedly referenced throughout the movie: battery of a boyfriend she had in college. She doesn't apologize for the violent crime but instead only regrets that she didn't hurt him enough to scare him into not pressing charges. It's a pitch black sentiment, but looking at the way Emily has spiraled into showing her malicious character, a character that has repeatedly showcased a violent disposition, the audience doesn't for a second doubt its validity.

Unlike many films that critique capitalism, Emily is not a protagonist that the audience is meant to understand. She is not an everyman stand-in, the type of relatable character who leaves space for the audience to climb into their shoes. She's someone foreign to most of those staring at the screen, an acid that dissolves the preconception that everybody is good at heart. She lets the audience know that there are people out there who don't fit into the utopia created by the optimists. There are those whose greed and malevolence are overpowering. Ford's camera follows Emily intimately throughout the entire movie, focusing on Plaza's face as she walks up staircases and down streets, examining minimal movements that tell the whole story. It shifts the focus of the movie inward, choosing to intricately examine the nature of Plaza's disconnected character instead of dissecting the society as a whole. It's a character study much more than it is a fable, less concerned with the culture that has shaped Emily than the stuff in her genes that has been present since manufacture. It's frightening because it taps into our fears of the incomprehensible, people whose frameworks are so different from ours that we can't deploy the same societal structures to guide them. It implants the idea that capitalism doesn't seduce some people into wrongdoing, but instead awakens harmful impulses that would have otherwise remained asleep.

Emily the Criminal depicts the evils of capitalism as the evils of humanity. It sees it as a system that pushes people towards the darkness of human nature instead of what their brains are telling them is moral. There are good people out there who crumble under its force, but Ford and Plaza are more interested with how it enchants the bad people and encourages them to thrive. Emily the Criminal is an engrossing film because it looks past the groundwork of American society and into the hearts of a handful of people whose immorality is allowed to thrive, providing a window into the brains of those who usually keep their less than desirable tendencies concealed.