NICOLE

WHEN SWIPING RIGHT GOES WRONG

★★☆☆☆ (Don’t Bother)

Director: James Schroeder

2019

If you’re a fan of the Lifetime channel, you will probably like Nicole, an avant-garde women’s revenge fantasy about an unstable lady on a date with a predator. As for me, I knew I couldn’t recommend this film when I realized there would be no payoff—you don’t know anything about her at the end that you didn’t know at the beginning. I thought this movie would be about a mentally ill woman out for revenge against the male sex, but according to the climax, it’s just an accident she ended up being wooed by a date r*pist. Nicole invites you to dinner and skips out on the bill.

There is one good reason watch this film, though. Minority actors make up the majority of the cast, and I don’t have to point out there’s a ridiculous low number of horror offerings for the Black community. Most low budget indies out there don't look as good as Nicole—not to mention the script’s dialogue feels authentic, and the characters are people we might meet in real life. If this project had gotten the funding we might have been given a more layered film with a higher body count. Instead, Nicole teases us with literal talking heads and then fails to deliver answers to our questions.

Nicole hints at having a fantasy life she uses to escape a black and white mental prison. She’s a moody young woman who glowers at every man (all are threatening in her eyes) while ignoring everybody else. When a handsome man at work is nice to her and brings her coffee, she dismisses him with a snide look. Is she socially awkward? Besides bad manners, Nicole has one other glaring trait: She drinks when she wakes up, when she brushes her teeth, while she’s driving the car, in the bathroom at her office…we get it, she’s an alcoholic. The reveal of Nicole’s vice should have been more subtle, the director could have simply left us with that funny moment when she’s on her doomed date with John and manages to down four alcoholic beverages before he can sip his first.

As for her Tinder date John, he sniffs cocaine and roofies his ladies so he can assault and photograph them. He’s a slimeball behind a dazzling smile, a nuanced character that dares us to like him, seducing us the way he seduces women before hurting them. It would have been much cleverer if we found out his profession when Nicole figured it out, not from an earlier shot of a photo in his bedroom.

From Nicole and John’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad date, we learn a few lessons that are valuable to anyone looking for love:

SPOILERS

RULE #1 – Leave a date when the woman is looking at you like Lorena Bobbitt during the last fight she had with her husband.

Considering what John does for a living, he’s not good with facial cues. We get the idea Nicole’s there for the free booze but…she pays her own tab. What’s up with that? John persists because it’s all about the booty, not her attitude, but any normal man would see the hatred in her eyes and know to back away. Being a third wheel on this date is so uncomfortable it feels like being trapped in a hot-air balloon with a divorcing couple.

RULE #2 – Keep your eye on your drink.

As soon as Nicole walks away, we see John take the opportunity to roofie her beverage, and we can tell he does this often. Nicole must be able to read minds, because she doesn’t seem worried and behaves as if she has the upper hand. That is bizarre. Anyhow, there are a lot of sickos out there, so don’t leave your drink unattended and don’t have someone order it for you while you’re in the bathroom.

RULE #3 – Never invite someone to your house on the first date.

This should be a given, but too many people think they’ll never be the one who winds up being somebody's skin lamp. A stranger should never know where you live! Nicole—who doesn’t even like John—tosses this common sense out the window and concedes to cooking him a late dinner, and this is when I got excited because I thought she had plans for him and that those selfies she took were breadcrumbs to a bigger picture. Nicole tries to sell the protagonist as a spider with a fly in her web, but she doesn’t have any other flies. Yawn.

RULE #4 – If your date is over the age of 21 and has disturbing art on the walls, it’s time to go.

After arriving at Nicole’s, John compliments her on her abstract paintings, but anyone out of college with collage art that could have been made during craft hour in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest should best be avoided as a love match. Yes, these are the pieces we create as teens when we think no one has ever pasted newspaper articles to a painted canvas, but Nicole is much too old to decorate her home with them.

Also, what does Nicole taking credit for her mother’s paintings have to do with anything? Did I miss something?

RULE #5 – After you commit murder, do not Google “How to get rid of a dead body.”

This is the point in the movie where I lost interest in Nicole. Apparently, the girl doesn’t watch Forensic Files because she does every single thing you’re not supposed to do when you’ve committed a crime. She doesn’t turn off a victim’s cell phone, she Google’s advice on how to get rid of a body, and at midnight she buys an axe, a saw, and five bricks from a lonely cashier who will most likely remember this encounter when the cops come calling. I’m not teaching readers any dirty tricks because there’s nothing I’ve said here that isn’t on some 24/7 CSI show.

I’m guessing the director wants us to think our protagonist is slick because she pays for her tools with cash, but this is almost adorable after the mistakes she’s made. The finale reveals Nicole is merely dim-witted, and a victim of circumstance, a disappointing revelation because I had hoped Nicole would be another Hard Candy—a smart, wronged female picking off creeps one-by-one. While a backstory is hinted, we don’t get enough to justify the way she is, and we don’t get a twist ending; there’s no flashback of trauma and no explanation of how her dead parents factor into anything. Being a victim does not make a character likable in the same way that dying doesn’t make someone an instant saint. There should be many aspects to a woman in a horror film, and one of them has to be more than a situation we can relate to.

GENRES: Diverse Characters, Feminist-Friendly, Psychological

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