Movies about confidence-trickery put a spin on the old rule about playing poker: look around the table and if you can’t see the chump … then it’s you. Watch a film about swindlers and you may well think you can see the person who’s being conned. But the film’s entire narrative procedure, and its pleasure, rely on you, the audience, repeatedly submitting to being played, even while in theory you are the one with the wised-up crook’s-eye-view of what is going on.
Screenwriters Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka have had big successes in the world of comedy and satire; now they have crafted this delectably enjoyable caper about fraudsters and Manhattan’s super-rich. It’s a little like something by David Mamet – though without reaching the Mametian hard concrete floor of cynicism – or maybe Stephen Frears’s sleazy drama The Grifters, based on the novel by Jim Thompson. It’s got double-crosses and triple-crosses, and characters individually profiled in a daisy-chain of interrelated chapter-headed scenes. And if these feel like the usual suspects, well Gatewood and Tanaka finally treat us to an old-fashioned Keyser Söze “walk-away” reveal scene. British TV director Benjamin Caron makes a surefooted feature debut here – and his experience on programmes by illusionist Derren Brown may have qualified him for this.
