“You are a toxic fucking nightmare,” spits a character in Bad Behaviour to Lucy (Jennifer Connelly), and in many respects, it’s an accurate assessment of the divorced mom. Alas, one hears and sees Lucy’s wretchedness far more than one comprehends it, and that shortcoming proves to be emblematic of New Zealand actress Alice Englert’s maiden directorial effort, which strives to scrutinize mother-daughter relations through a darkly comedic lens and only comes up with grating incoherence.
Debuting at this year’s , Connelly does a whole lot of emoting, her body language alternately coiled and fidgety, and her face in an incessant state of unease, whether she’s glaring at idiot companions, seething at a bright light that won’t stop flickering right outside her room’s window, or rolling her eyes at Elon, who soon outs himself as a charlatan with nothing but stolen hot air to dispense.
An exercise in which everyone pretends to be either a mother or a baby underlines that Lucy is both the horrid monster she claims to be and also, deep down, a wounded child. For all her massive exertion, though, Connelly can’t make her unlikable protagonist compelling because, at just about every turn, her acting shows. Her performance is a case of effort undermining authenticity.
Bad Behaviour’s third act is somehow more meandering than the material that preceded it, charting Lucy and Dylan’s uneasy rapport and testy attempts to hash out their differences at the same time that Lucy tries, half-heartedly, to avoid jail with the aid of a public defender (Karan Gill).
A prolonged breakfast-ordering sequence vainly searches for laughs and is followed by a trek through the woods that features so many implausible developments, statements and actions that it’s hard to tell if this is another of the film’s dream sequences—one of which, just to further exacerbate the film’s helter-skelter construction, includes animation.
Following a fleeting cameo from The Power of the Dog director Jane Campion (Englert’s mom) and a romantic tryst of absurd nonsensicality, Bad Behaviour climaxes with more posturing on a mountain peak—a fitting destination for a film that succeeds only in constantly reaching new levels of direness.
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