First-time writer-director Cory Finley might have had the fortune of attending Yale–the embodiment of New England privilege–but he somehow never lost his empathy, though he might have realized later, as a result of that college experience, “I thought that empathy was the one thing you needed to be a good person.” But alas, seeing the way the world of affluence operates, it’s very clear that empathy is the last thing you need, at least if you want to ascend to the category of success and remain there. It was this germinal notion that eventually led Finley–more playwright than screenwriter–to pen the script for what would become Thoroughbreds. Billed as an American Psycho meets Heathers sort of genre (the very best and most accurate kind), the disarming in its tranquility account of two former friends brought together again by the circumstances of their respective ostracism forces the audience to eventually come to their own terms with what constitutes empathy in the present epoch.
This much is manifest in Amanda (Olivia Cooke, best known for her perhaps equally stoic breakthrough in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl), a teenager who literally feels nothing for myriad potential psychological attributions. As she non-sarcastically explains her therapist’s assessment to her renewed from elementary school friend, Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy), “First it was borderline personality, then severe depression, now she thinks I’m antisocial with schizoid tendencies. She’s basically just flipping to random pages of the DSM and throwing medications at me. But at the end of the day, I have a perfectly healthy brain. It just doesn’t contain feelings. And that doesn’t necessarily make me a bad person. It just means I have to work a little harder than everybody else to be good.” And work she does, often impersonating emotions–most especially Lily’s–in the mirror to represent the very best possible re-creation of someone that might be moral and upstanding. Lily, however, instantly comes across as anything but, lying to Amanda about getting paid for “hanging out” a.k.a. tutoring her for a standardized test. This prompts the all too clever and foreseeing Amanda to get in the jibe, “Glad you set an alarm to make sure we didn’t ‘hang out’ longer than intended.” She then puts Lily in her place by telling her she has her mother’s email password and read the entire negotiation for money exchange between them.
It is ultimately Amanda’s assertion about working hard to “be good” as a result of feeling nothing that comes full-circle by the end of the film, for it is often those people, like Lily herself, who “feel too much” that, at their core, are more likely to engage in a vicious act of selfishness under the guise of it being “for the benefit” of someone else. This much is established at the beginning, with Lily not only insisting to Amanda that she isn’t getting paid by Amanda’s mother to help her with her studying as a means of friendship bonding (“What are you talking about? I’m not charging you, we’re hanging out”), but also in Lily’s endurement of her stepfather’s abusive behavior–for it means getting envelopes of cash left out for her whenever she “needs it.” This, of course, speaks to the different set of rules that apply to the children of affluence.
As Amanda is deposited at Lily’s doorstep in a BMW and let in by a maid, the first three minutes of the film are already immediately indicative of the type of ironic parental absenteeism that thrives in this hierarchy of existence, as they invisibly swoop in only when a mess needs to be cleaned up that might reflect poorly upon their own standing within “the community.” It is only those employed for menial tasks that seem to be omnipresent in this world. While waiting for Lily, for example, a pool cleaner walking past from the outside shoots Amanda a head nod, and she imitates it afterward, as though preparing to be somewhat emotive for her hangout session.
Amanda, appraising the decor while continuing to be on hold for Lily’s presence, can already tell herself that Lily’s stepdad, Mark (Paul Sparks)–a typically douchebag name–is a garden variety asshole, framed pictures of himself with a poached lion and posing with a samurai sword being just some of telltale signs before she even meets him. When Lily does finally grace Amanda with the luxury of spending time with her, her demeanor is clipped and controlled, as it always has to be in front of everyone else. Over the course of the next meeting, however, she drops her facade entirely, admitting that now, even though she’s not getting paid, she only invited Amanda over to passive aggressively make her stepdad uncomfortable as word of Amanda’s cruel murder of her own horse has spread all over town.
Considering Finley’s playwriting background, it’s no surprise that there is a Pinterian quality to the fact that the act of Amanda’s barbaric euthanization of her horse by knife is something that we may not have actually seen happen, but that colors the entire narrative with its stain. When Lily confesses to Amanda that she’s been made privy to the photos taken by a fellow peer’s father, “a part owner of the stable” who sent it to his lawyer for presumable recompense, Amanda explains that it wasn’t how she wanted it go, insisting that if the midazolam hydrochloride had worked, she wouldn’t have needed to “climb on top of him–he was on the ground at this point–and start cutting away at the flesh of his neck. The goal was to get to the spine as quickly as possible. And it took some time. The muscle had a lot of gristle in it and the knife got dull pretty quickly.” Her rote recitation of the manner in which she went about ending Honeymooner’s life convinces Lily more than ever that Amanda was right to suggest killing Mark before, having instantaneously intuited her contempt, and that she’s just the person to do it. It’s at this point that we realize, in complete certainty, that even though Amanda might not be able to technically feel anything, she is a true and loyal friend to Lily, despite how parsimoniously Lily has reciprocated–especially for someone so “full of feelings.” A friend like Amanda is hard to come by not only in “real life,” but even more so in the realm of the rich, where every social transaction is just that: a transaction. What can you do for me? How is this benefitting me?
With this in mind, there is a question posed by Thoroughbreds that demands what makes a life worth living. Amanda insists to the low-level local drug dealer, Tim (Anton Yelchin, in his final performance), that his isn’t unless he takes their offer of 100K to kill Mark–otherwise he’s just another middling sex offender with no hope of rising among the ranks of the crime world.
Some time after their botched encounter with Tim, while sitting on the couch watching TV with Amanda, Lily can’t keep herself from asking, “Do you remember that stuff you said to Tim the other day? About how his life wasn’t worth living…Do you ever ask that question about yourself? I just mean like, if you can’t feel anything, like even happiness or…” Realizing her rudeness, yet again, Lily stops herself from finishing the question, but it’s too late, Amanda has been imbued with a valuable epiphany about the importance of feelings. It’s just that, living in the century that we do, maybe she thought she really was just like everyone else. For how many of us can honestly say we haven’t become numb as a result primarily of a lack of tactility and in the flesh human interaction? But no, life is largely even more meaningless when you manage to shirk that thing called emotional response.
The name Thoroughbreds is of course dual-pronged, referring to the type of horses that Lily and Amanda would ride together in their youth (and that Amanda still did before killing Honeymooner), as well as the type of people they’re supposed to be: of unmixed, “pure” lineage–how the wealthy see themselves. But Lily, with her stepfather in her life, is no longer truly a thoroughbred, and can’t seem to return to that state until he’s out of the picture.
With Finley’s attention to detail thriving in every scene, from Amanda sitting in her equestrian trophy and ribbon-filled room to the endless amount of rich man’s hobbies that Mark has (the scene of him putting together a model airplane comes to mind, as well as the fact that he’s always on his rowing machine), the film, for all its minimalism, is packed with significance in each frame. The tenseness of even the most basic of interactions is what immortalizes Amanda’s line, “It’s only weird if you make it weird.”
That Amanda killed her horse for reasons of humanity is overlooked by everyone in the community, rather ironically telling of the fact that they themselves are all monsters of cliche and vanity. Because the manner was so malicious is what leads everyone to question how anyone other than a schizoid could be capable of such brutality. But wouldn’t it have been more brutal to leave the horse suffering?
By the final moments of the movie, it truly seems that Amanda is the most empathetic of all, describing a dream to Lily in a letter that paints a picture of a world in which she’s become her own horse and humans have vanished into their screens. She writes, “I’m Honeymooner and I’m dying. And I rise out of my body, and I’m staring down at our whole suburb and time is speeding up. And I see generations of people coming and going and building bigger houses. And then eventually, the people start spending more and more of their time staring at their smartphones. And soon enough, they’re forgetting to clean their houses or mow their lawns or eat. And eventually all the houses rot and collapse and the people disappear, vanishing completely into the internet. And then, and this is the really beautiful part, the horses take over. And the whole suburb is just beautiful thoroughbred stallions with no owners and no memory of owners and no way of knowing how expensive they are. Just mating and galloping through the ruins.” It is the conclusion of her recounting this that leads Amanda to crack her first genuine smile.
