Sandra (Briana Middleton) and Tom (Justice Smith) get off on the wrong foot when she enters his boutique bookstore looking for a specific text for her thesis but rejects his offer to grab dinner at a nearby restaurant.  They laugh it off and try again, and as the weeks go by, the two become an inseparable pair.  Tom’s world is quickly flipped, though, when Sandra, while delivering money owed by her brother to some loan sharks, goes missing.  In his search to find her, Tom uncovers a massive ring of deception involving some very rich and influential figures in the city, forcing him to reconsider who – if anyone – he can trust. 

Benjamin Caron directs Sharper as part of the development deal between A24 and Apple TV Studios.  From a script penned by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, the 116 phycological thriller has lots of twists and turns but still keeps everything easy enough to track so that audiences do not grow frustrated on their couches trying to keep up with something as ouroboric as Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) and instead can fall into place with a cast of recognizable faces, more akin to Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me (2013). 

The film starts out unassuming enough as Tom and Sandra casually flirt into something a little more serious.  With a shared love for classic literature and Fellini films, they find their common ground and by the time Tom’s birthday rolls around, his friends remark how incredible it is that they have only been dating a few weeks given their inseparability.   

Smith is one of the most steadily working young actors of today, finding himself involved with the Jurassic World franchise, Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019), and Generation (2021), a misaligned teen dramedy riding on the coattails of another HBO and A24 property, Euphoria (2019-Current).  While he is not quite ready to open a film on his own, he may be soon, given his upcoming turn in Dungeons & Dragons (2023) and a reunion with his Paper Towns (2015) co-star, Natt Wolff, in the undated Young Lust.  In Sharper, Smith plays the patsy taken to the tune of $350 grand, and after the con, the film largely leaves him alone to follow Sandra and how she plays into the scam.  It is a relatively quiet and unassuming role – a far cry from his turn in Detective Pikachu and Generation – but Smith works well as the audience surrogate into this twisted web of lies spun by the wealthy and the powerful.  As the narrative unfolds, he is not so unattached to this scheme as initially believed, and while much of his involvement is relegated to a “here’s what you didn’t see” montage at the end of the film, Smith works with competency in leading a team and bringing a counter-scam into fruition.  As he continues to find work in these not-so-run of the mill actions thrillers, Smith keeps edging closer and closer to being one of our brightest and most exciting leading men in the genre in the same vein as John David Washington who also has a proven knack for finding roles with one foot each in both craft and commerce. 

The bulk of the film follows the smooth-talking and conniving Max (Sebastian Stan) as he infiltrates Richard Hobbes’ (John Lithgow) business empire through a romantic affair of his own design utilizing Madeline (Julianne Moore).  It sounds confusing on paper, and to an extent, it is confusing on screen, but what Gatewood and Tanaka are careful to ensure during their writing is that as an audience we are never double-crossed more than the characters are.  Once the initial scheme has been laid out, we understand what is happening and what Max and his team are working towards; the thrills come in watching how the plan unravels out of Max’s control and how the characters begin to crack and spin off their own lies in an effort to self-serve.   

Max is one of the most interesting characters in Sharper so it makes sense that much of the film revolves around his involvement in the plot, but Caron handles him in the most ordinary way possible.  It creates for some tonal confusion, a disconnect between the page and the screen that will plague the entirety of the film, but it is not so offensive as to render Sharper unwatchable. For example, Sandra, like Tom also finds herself taking a backseat role in the film despite having so much intrigue surrounding her in the first act. The majority of the film revolves around the Moore and Lithgow plot as they make an unconventional couple, and while the pair interact well with each other and with Stan, there is not enough kinetic energy to carry the film. The star power is there for sure, and Moore commands the screen in even her most simple scenes, but there is an electricity missing from the film which was realized in the early act when it was Tom and Sandra’s story.   

What makes this slowdown apparent, though, is not so much the work of the screenwriting team as they do spin an interesting yarn, but it is in the shot construction that feels so stationary. Even looking at this on a technical level, it does not fall solely on the shoulders of cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen or editor Yan Miles as the work they put in is not bad, it just feels all too safe. The mutual unhappiness of the characters is more of a side effect of the plot than the actual point of the story, so the slow and stationary construction makes the film feel unnecessarily weighed down instead of putting us into the perspective of these people who, by all accounts, are not the true leaders of this story. To be overly cynical for a moment will help to put this critique into focus; it feels like a made for TV movie in how the direction, cinematography, and editing talk to each other. Given both A24’s track record for promoting films that color a little outside the lines and Apple’s obsession with vanity and sleek design, Sharper feels very plain Jane in appearance. The characters fit the tropes of the elite class and they play well with each other, but the camera does not follow suit and by being a little more daring with its construction and editing, Sharper would take on that same glossy look to better capture the world of the film. 

Overall, Sharper is still an enjoyable ride. A smart but not overly complicated script is the key to its success and the cast are able to revel in their roles. Everyone ultimately has a role to play in this perverse variation of a familial unit, and they are really able to lean into these relationships. In the end, this family and their shifting relationship and distrust in each other is the driving force behind the film and in that regard, it is a shining success. The visuals just are not up to the same level as the screenwriting, and while a still camera can help settle a twisted narrative, there is just too much stillness here that it becomes distracting how little our view changes in this grey and color-drained world.