To Leslie movie review & film summary (2022)

Sweeney and Leslie are an excellent display screen workforce. He is as nice, uncomplicated and simple as Leslie is mercurial, tortured, and internalized. However paradoxically, Sweeney is extra intriguing throughout his first few appearances onscreen as a result of he is as beneficiant as Leslie is greedy and manipulative. Moderately than chase her from the property, Sweeney affords her a job as a maid on the motel, and throws in a room for her to stay in. He even pretends to have mistaken Leslie for someone who’d been making use of for the maid job, which provides Leslie a bit of present of dignity earlier than she’s even gotten to know him. 

Normally characters who’re this good in a film the primary time you meet them change into hypocrites, exploiters or worse. Sweeney’s a genuinely good one who appears to need to make everybody’s life higher, even when it means dropping cash and getting personally harm. Sweeney is aware of what he is entering into — we finally get a backstory that explains why he is so type and nonjudgmental round folks with Leslie’s issues, even when she’s at her most frazzled and pathetic. And yeah, you guessed it, he is candy on her, and Risenborough and Maron have such speedy, easygoing chemistry that there isn’t any manner the movie shall be in a position resist the temptation to pair them up for a contented ending, regardless that in actual life a relationship like that is equally more likely to finish with the police or fireplace division pulling up on the lodge within the wee hours.

Within the love story side, as in others—similar to Nancy’s cartoonish single-minded dedication to publicly humiliating the heroine at any time when she will—”To Leslie” makes selections which are a extra typical than one would possibly want for, particularly contemplating how effectively the movie rivets our consideration just by making a psychologically believable grownup girl and letting us watch her exist. The character of Leslie, and Risenborough’s efficiency within the function, are larger than the movie that surrounds them. A few of “To Leslie” has a type of heartwarming Nineties Sundance-indie really feel, although the unpretentious appearing and filming, particularly in the course of the razor-wire first act, disguise that; the longer the movie goes on, the extra predictable the story turns into—and all informed, there’s most likely an excessive amount of early degradation and never sufficient scenes exhibiting Leslie doing the exhausting work of righting her personal ship; the stability appears off, and there is most likely an entire different, extra stunning film hiding inside that “Ten Months Later” ellipse close to the tip.