Rare Beasts: Billie Piper’s Anti-Romcom Shows the Beastly Side of Modern Relationships
By Linda Barnard
Rating: B
“How do you like the smothering?” a character asks Billie Piper’s Mandy about her new boyfriend, Pete (Leo Bill) in the comedy Rare Beasts. “Not as bad as the hateful honesty,” she replies cheerfully.
There’s a lot of hateful honesty going around as Piper (a teen pop singer who went on to roles in Dr. Who, Penny Dreadful, and British TV series I Hate Suzie) takes a cudgel to treacly Brit romcoms with Rare Beasts.
Piper makes her directing debut and stars here, in addition to writing a script that puts more emphasis on dialogue that snaps with wit and acidic takedowns than plot.
Watch Bonnie Laufer's interview with Billie Piper
The result is an occasional brilliantly funny but exasperatingly chaotic, vignette-style examination of relationships, male rage, and female insecurities. When Rare Beasts succeeds, it’s down to Piper. She’s a brilliant physical comic, whose face works like she’s trying to a loosen a toffee from her back molars. But she has to wear the movie’s weak spots, too.
Dogged by disappointment and wobbly self-esteem, Piper’s Mandy isn’t one to give up. She anxiously starts her days with frantic face-tapping and affirmations about her self-worth. I deserve better, she whispers repeatedly, then sighs and settles for the bucket of warm spit life hands her.
Take her job. Mandy works in a soul-stealing London TV production house writers’ room that’s littered with misogynists. Her mother Marion (Kerry Fox), not-long separated from husband Vic (David Thewlis), lives with Mandy and has a few opinions of her own about relationships.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Vic has moved on but still hangs around to stir the emotional pot. Both Fox and Thewlis often steal scenes — not easy to do with Piper in the room — especially Thewlis, who manages to even make repairing a kitchen cabinet entertaining.
Mandy is the single mom of son Larch (Toby Woolf, very good), an obsessive kid prone to acting out in frustration. Somewhere under his tics and rages there’s something endearing about Larch, even when he’s in the middle of a heel-hammering tantrum.
Mandy’s first date with co-worker Pete is a cringe-making evening of insults, confessions, and inquisition that wraps with Mandy noisily vomiting in the street outside the restaurant, right about when Pete decides he adores her.
“I find women in the main intolerable,” Pete tells her with a serious gaze. “But I realize that I can’t live without them.”
And so women-hating Catholic “man of faith” Pete and atheist Mandy fall into a relationship. How did that happen? Look no further than their first sexual encounter, when Mandy insists on undressing for Pete so she can detail all the parts of her body she despises.
The use of drippy romantic songs to signal romance (or Piper’s version of it) and Lily James in a cameo as a batty bride are among the movie’s best touches.
But the mugging, shouty priest at a family wedding who does everything but holler “mawage!” is an awkward failure — and not in the good way talented Piper arranges throughout Rare Beasts.
Rare Beasts. Written and directed by Billie Piper. Starring Billie Piper, Leo Bill, Kerry Fox, David Thewlis, Toby Woolf and Lily James. Available on VOD August 20.