Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Two con artists have spent 26 years training their only daughter to swindle, scam and steal at every turn. During a desperate and hastily conceived heist, they charm a stranger into joining them, only to have their entire world turned upside down.
Kajillionaire is a distinctly singular film — Miranda July's unmistakable voice gives it a dreamlike, offbeat texture that feels wholly its own. Evan Rachel Wood delivers a remarkably physical and internalized performance as Old Dolio, a woman who has been so thoroughly conditioned that she barely inhabits her own body; Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins are equally precise as the casually monstrous parents. The con-artist premise is really a vehicle for exploring emotional neglect and the terrifying first steps toward intimacy, which gives the film genuine thematic depth. Cinematography is competent and occasionally striking but not particularly distinguished. The plot meanders in its middle section and the ending, while emotionally earned, feels slightly abrupt and too neatly resolved given the film's otherwise unsettled energy. Its novelty is high — there is genuinely nothing else quite like it in recent American independent cinema.