Review: ‘Lucky’ is fierce, unapologetic, and glorious

Promising Young Woman and Lucky exist in the same universe: reality. The reality for women and woman-identifying people is a relentless assault on identity and agency; they’re attacked on the street, in the super market, at parties, even in their own homes (thanks, internet!). There is no safe space. Natasha Kermani’s Lucky, written by the film’s star Brea Grant, turns a classic home invasion premise into a pulverizing and unavoidable conversation piece about the patriarchy and its seemingly indestructible foundation.

Acclaimed self-help book author May (Grant) has worked for her success, clawing her way through a male-driven industry right to the very top. She’s riding a wave off the popularity of her book, “Go It Alone,” which becomes the crux of the entire film — women unable to help one another because they’re barely staying afloat themselves. Lucky opens on May hearing the news from her manager (Leith M. Burke) that the publisher is no longer interested in printing any more copies and instead looking to the follow-up. The stakes are naturally high, but May is ready for the task. She heads for home, a bit deflated, but still confident in her talents.

Later that night, a phone call from her assistant Edie (Yasmine Al-Bustami) confirming an upcoming book appearance arouses her and her husband Ted (Dhruv Uday Singh) out of a deep slumber. May struggles to fall back asleep when she hears a noise outside of her home. She creeps through the living room and peers into the backyard to discover a masked stalker watching far below. A bit rattled, she scurries back to the bedroom and expresses her fears to Ted, who sighs and nonchalantly rolls out of bed, saying, “He’s not wasting any time.” The unnamed man is heard smashing a window, and Ted coolly grabs a golf club and heads downstairs. May soon follows, finding the man in the living room, and a scuffle ensues. Letter opener in hand, May makes one clear swipe at the man, who quickly gains the upper hand (literally), and Ted clobbers him over the head, his body dropping to the floor.

Ted is far less shaken by the night’s events, making mention that this happens literally every single night. It’s a strange moment, a tiny suggestion of the film’s thesis. The police arrive, take their statements, and promise to catch the guy. Well, as May soon discovers, the masked attacker does return every night after that, and the police are not any help at all. Just like real life. Furthermore, it seems nobody in May’s life takes the threat seriously, from her close friends to her manager and even medical personnel. Everyone shrugs it off as a normal thing that happens, frequently telling her how “lucky” she is to survive at all.

Lucky is a striking, “surreal version of our own world,” Kermani notes in her director’s statement. May’s world spirals out with an almost sci-fi sort of distortion, as it’s soon revealed many other women are facing the same fate. But the script always combs real life implications about women’s constant war against misogyny, an ever-present force from which there is no escape. It’s nihilistic, but it’s honest. You can read the headlines and know this is the world for women. And it has been this way for centuries. Even the good guys have been no help; in fact, they too eventually crack and get consumed by the system, in which they are just another cog. The machine rolls mercilessly forward, and women, as the film posits, must keep their head down and accept that this is how it is. Unless the entire patriarchy is totally decimated and rebuilt from the ground up, nothing will change.

As Promising Young Woman before it, Lucky is revolutionary in displaying cold, hard reality through a powerful, sharp, and unsettling horror lens.

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