Aubrey Plaza, the queen of weaponized deadpan, plays it all-the-way straight in Emily the Criminal, a tough little first feature by writer-director John Patton Ford. The movie has a topical spin—it's set in the world of crushing student loan debt—but it's really about the shapeshifting nature of hopes and dreams, and the ways in which the riptides of life can carry us away in unexpected and sometimes alarming directions.
Plaza's character, Emily, is a young woman who made the mistake of following her own dreams into art school, which has left her $70,000 in debt and with little hope of getting a decent job in the real world. (She also has a minor rap sheet that's blocking her future like a boulder in the road.) So she now humps orders for a food delivery service, her life going nowhere.
