When it comes to movies, I don’t scare easily… and then there was this

It’s true.  I’m not trying to sound like a tough guy, but you can sit me down in front of any horror movie and it’s not going to frighten or bother me too much. 

This past Saturday I watched “Saint Maud”, a young palliative nurse who’s devoted her life to God.  But she’s losing her mind, and begins thinking up some jaw dropping exercises in self torture to do penance.  It’s horror on a new level, and after it was over I had a cup of warm cocoa and went to bed.  Sweet dreams!

And then there was this.  A couple nights ago I saw “I Care A Lot” and I can’t get it out of my mind.  It made me angry and uncomfortable more than anything, and the ending provided little relief.  The star of the show (pictured here, Rosamund Pike) quipped “It has something for everybody!” and I know she’s an actress, but I still thought Yes it has something for everybody if they own a concentration camp or two.

I’m not going to give anything “good” away, it’s basically this:  Rosamund plays Marla, a so-called guardian appointed by the courts who (with the help of some shady doctors offices and nursing homes expecting kickbacks) targets senior citizens who live alone. 

She’ll have them declared a danger to themselves, get their social security signed over to some dowdy facility while Marla sells the person’s home and pockets the proceeds… along with their life savings.

In that photo above, Marla displays a wall of her victims like a hunter would display the heads of animals he’s bagged.  And then one day she gets a call of a “real cherry”, a woman (Dianne Wiest) who is 70 years old and lives alone. 

No family of her own, Diane owns a beautiful Cape Cod in a wealthy neighborhood.  Her life is a full one of swimming, painting, gardening… and Marla’s going to take it all away, learning later Dianne has a secret.  A dangerous one.

Marla doesn’t care.  She never loses.  NEVER.  “I’m a lioness, not a lamb!”  She’s the anti-hero you secretly admire and wish you could be, so rich, so successful, a businesswoman who takes no prisoners--

Except she’s not.   She’s not a businesswoman, just some crummy thief with no moral compass.  Her nursing home “pigeons” are fed a steady diet of pills to keep them from fighting the system until they die, confused & alone. 

She’s guilty of elder abuse on a massive scale.  

Netflix bills this as a ‘thriller slash black comedy’.  It just felt vulgar to me, these older people’s final years and legacies stolen from them by 1-2 people who know the system.  I kept thinking What if that was my mom, and none of us kids were there to protest?  And look at me, I’ve never married, no kids… Dianne Weist is only 10 years older than me.

Why doesn’t Netflix make a movie about child sex trafficking and call that “deliciously nasty” too?   Is one abuse less atrocious than the other?

Am I being too unkind here, taking this too personally?  Shortly after I finished watching the movie, I saw on the local news where the administrator of a large nursing home in Pittsburgh (in Mt. Lebanon no less, a pretty upscale neighborhood) has been directing staffers for years to falsify records, to make it appear the facility met federal and state staffing requirements. 

It turns out the home has been seriously understaffed and patients went uncared for.  Is it just me or do we hear of this type of thing too often?

Here’s a trailer for the movie… maybe it is delicious as one critic said.  For myself, it just hit too close to home.