Pretty Thing Movie Review: Clueless

Alicia Silverstone stars in Pretty Thing, an erotic thriller that wants to seduce but forgets the danger. A stylish setup with no payoff.

However, for every memorable entry, there are countless forgettable attempts that mistake sleaze for sophistication, and unfortunately, Pretty Thing falls squarely into the latter category.

Filmed initially as The Bird and the Bee (a far more intriguing title in my book), director Justin Kelly’s latest film pitches itself as a sultry neo-noir in the ’90s mold: chic, pouty, heavy on candlelight and brightly lit warning signs. What we get instead is more of a threadbare cinematic shrug dressed in white trench coats. Alicia Silverstone (Reptile) stars as Sophie, a successful pharmaceutical marketing exec with a museum-ready Manhattan condo, a high-powered boss lady wardrobe, and no emotional entanglements. No husband, no kids, not even a dog she has to get home early to walk.

She meets Elliot (Karl Glusman, Civil War), a soft-spoken cater-waiter with a clingy mom and a “who, me?” expression welded to his otherwise brooding face. Their connection is instant. Sex happens. She jets him off to Paris by date number two. Sex happens. They get back to NYC, and reality sets in. Champagne flows. Sex happens. He takes her to an off-off-off-Broadway play starring his friend Sam (Britne Oldford, Long Bright River). Sex happens. And then she ghosts him.

This is the moment when the movie should ignite. When passion turns to poison. We’ve seen it happen in Unfaithful, The Boy Next Door, and Swimfan. Screenwriter Jack Donnelly has already flipped the script by making the central couple an older, powerful woman and a younger, needy man, but doesn’t do anything additional to make the swap serve a purpose. Elliot begins lurking, texting, looming. But rather than escalating into a Play Misty for Me-style terror, it plateaus into awkward, high-school-level discomfort. There’s no sense of Sophie being trapped or spiraling. Instead of feeling like a woman being hunted, Silverstone plays her like someone mildly inconvenienced by a clingy Tinder match.

The whole thing feels curiously frictionless. There’s no escalating fear as in the films mentioned above, when boundaries blur with true menace, and someone winds up brandishing an overly large kitchen knife and heads straight for the jugular. It’s just repeated scenes of awkward encounters and blank stares. What set these earlier films apart from Pretty Thing was tension, chemistry, and an understanding that obsession doesn’t emerge from sweaty closeups and terse voicemails. It’s danger. It’s consequences. Pretty Thing wants a membership card to this club but shows up without the requisite heat or the infectious hangover.

Silverstone, a bona fide 90s icon who lit up the screen as a teen temptress in The Crush (making Pretty Thing a bit of a full-circle moment) and carved her own brand of “as if” cool in Clueless, has entered her “why not” era of roles. And to her credit, she’s been picking interesting material like The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lodge, and a spirited musical remake of Valley Girl. But Sophie doesn’t seem to suit her, and I’d even go so far as to say that she feels miscast. She’s game, sure, but stiff. The body language is stifled, uncomfortable even, and her line delivery is strained.

Dressed by costumer Matthew Simonelli in austere trench coats and restrictively tailored suits, she looks less like a power player meant to signal dominance and sensuality and more like someone auditioning for a Calvin Klein ad about loneliness in The Big Apple. The wardrobe’s doing a lot of work the performance can’t match. It’s not entirely her fault, though. The script gives her little to chew on, but she never quite makes Sophie feel lived in. Her romantic encounters with Glusman feel perfunctory, lacking the raw chemistry essential to selling their whirlwind attraction.

Glusman, whose previous work in Gaspar Noé’s Love showed far more daring (and way more of him, in 3D, no less), is equally muted. Elliot is less a threat and more a bummer, the kind of guy who definitely writes bad poetry in between shifts of moping and fretting. Living with his overbearing mother, Peggy (a solid Catherine Curtin, of Bad Shabbos, whose depressingly sad performance genuinely made me reach for anxiety medication), Elliot comes across as pathetic rather than menacing. Their dynamic suggests there’s something deeper, possibly more insidious, at play, but the film never digs in to explore. It simply discards it like a leftover plot idea and moves on.

And that’s Pretty Thing in a nutshell: it hints at depth, then gets distracted by something shiny. The supporting cast fares better, but only briefly. Tammy Blanchard (The Invitation) shows up as Sophie’s no-nonsense sister Amanda, all New York bark and blazing energy, and immediately makes you wish the movie were about her. Her appearance is so quick that the final credits have to list her as Amanda (Sophie’s Sister) just as a point of clarification. Blanchard injects the film with the kind of spark it’s otherwise missing, then vanishes. Oldford’s Sam has even less screen time but hints at a life and personality the leads never muster. Every time the movie edges toward something intriguing, it backs away into bland territory.

As a director, Kelly has shown he can work wonders with real-life source material (King Cobra, I Am Michael, JT LeRoy), but fictional terrain seems to slip through his fingers. The mood is there: dim lights, velvet shadows, soft-focus everything. Without tension or urgency, though, it just sits on screen like a glossy magazine ad for a leather couch you’d never buy. He edited the film himself as well, which might explain why entire characters (i.e., Blanchard’s) feel chopped to pieces, and the final act drags out recycled beats. Matt Klammer’s cinematography leans heavily on soft focus and golden-hour lighting but often crosses into the unintentionally murky. And Tim Kvasnosky’s ambient score? A breathy, repetitive mix of moans and minor keys that made me want to mute the whole thing.

At a time when conversations about skewed power dynamics, consent, and female sexuality dominate cultural discourse, the film had an opportunity to explore these themes with intelligence and still be an entertaining erotic thriller. The premise has a tangy bite to it, but the film doesn’t go there. It borrows the outline of better thrillers without adding anything new. Instead, it settles for surface-level titillation without earning any of its attempts at provocative moments. The lack of genuine stakes—Sophie has no family or professional reputation to protect, and Elliot poses no real threat—drains the story of tension. The real frustration is that we’re long overdue for an intelligent, sexy thriller that doesn’t rely on clichés or stumble with tone. There’s a void where Disclosure, Eyes Wide Shut, and yes, even Poison Ivy once thrived. Pretty Thing isn’t it. It’s not dangerous. It’s not sexy. It’s too safe to seduce and too shallow to scare.

Pretty Thing will be released in select US theatres and on VOD on July 4, 2025.

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