The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun

A young woman named Dany works in an advertising agency. Her boss asks her to drop him and his family at the airport, then drive his very nice Thunderbird back to his house. She decides to take it to the sea instead. At each stop along the way, people react as though she was there just the day before. Then a dead body turns up in the trunk.

That's what I knew about The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun prior to watching, because that's what the description on Netflix told me. I wonder how knowing that going in affected viewing it, because I spent the movie torn on what was going on. We see visions of things, but I was unsure, are they her dreams, her fantasies, things that actually happened? If they did happen, has she forgotten them, repressed them? Does she have multiple personalities, and the one is unaware of what the other has been doing?

Dany seems shy, a little awkward. She tries to be more open, take chances, maybe play up her attractiveness a little, but it doesn't work how she planned. Her attempts backfire somehow. For a long time, it felt like the story of a young woman trying to assert herself, do what she wants instead of what she thinks people expect of her, only for the universe to reach out and punish her. Try and step outside these bounds, and we will make your life miserable. Get back in your lane.

But maybe she's imagining it all? Her guilty conscience gnawing at her. But she's definitely being followed. Her boss' wife, Anita, an old coworker of Dany's, is acting strangely. Nice, but in an impatient, forced way. She certainly doesn't seem happy to see Dany, as her husband said she would be. But how do all these people know her? Why are they so oddly specific about the details that make them certain of it?

In the last ten minutes, the movie explains everything. I could see that being annoying for some people, but I appreciated it. I'd spent the entire 80 minutes prior to that with my mind weighing all the different theories against each other, and I was just ready to have some sort of answer.

Freya Mavor is able to shift easily between the different facets of Dany's personality. Show the clumsy shift to a shy, awkward person when life throws her a disappointment, or give her the confident attitude of a woman who knows all the guys are watching her walk. Confusion with yet another person insisting they know her, shifting to exhaustion making her just go with it. You can see she's a little too willing to trust for her own good, but she's not going to go down without a fight.

It's a good movie, I just got worn out by it because I couldn't stop trying to figure out what the trick was. I guess you could argue the story didn't draw me in sufficiently if I was constantly trying to pull back and break it down, but it probably deserves some credit for making me wonder if I could trust what I was seeing on screen, or my perceptions of it, of what was real and what wasn't.