The comma makes all the difference in the title “Alice, Darling.” It’s not an endearment, but rather, depending on what’s next, could be a request, a behest, an entreaty, perhaps even a demand, an order or a backhanded compliment. The title’s grammatical structure is a clever bit of wordplay to signify the ways in which words can have different meanings and different results, depending on how they’re used. This is especially apt for this indie drama in which Anna Kendrick plays a woman reckoning with an emotionally and verbally abusive intimate relationship.
Alice (Kendrick) has a few tics that we’re introduced to right away. She twists her hair around her fingertip until it’s tight, she pulls at the ends of her long brown hair, ripping it from the scalp, rolling it into balls. Yet she still curls her shredded locks into bouncy waves every morning, applying liquid eyeliner like it’s armor.
It is a kind of armor, a mask that she believes will protect her from the sidelong barbs that her boyfriend Simon (Charlie Carrick) tosses her way. Simon is older, he is ambitious (an artist) and nothing seems to be to his satisfaction, not the attendance at his gallery opening, or the steady stream of attention he demands from Alice, who is trying so hard to be “good” (as she says) that she constantly looks like a deer in headlights.
