‘Bad Behaviour’ Review: Jennifer Connelly Finds No Rest on a Spiritual Retreat In Alice Englert’s Needling Debut

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic On the face of it, Lucy does not seem like the kind of person who would go on a spiritual retreat. She’d probably agree with that herself.

But she’d like to be, and so she struggles through the enforced silences and the sharing sessions, hoping to attain a kind of enlightenment she doesn’t really believe in.

An embittered former teen actor, played by Jennifer Connelly with the scorched, brittle air of one steadily checking out of polite society, her thorny aura is an ill fit for the expensive Oregon sanctuary she’s signed up for, all hushed meditation and touchy-feely trust exercises, and this energy-based conflict gives Alice Englert‘s strange, alluring satirical drama “Bad Behaviour” an immediate pull of intrigue — vibes so discordantly violent, one feels they have to give way to something physical and drastic.

At the film’s rough midpoint, they do — in ways that confirm the startling, admirable severity and bluntness of Englert’s first feature as a director, and also bring it to a head that its slightly softer, more conventionally oddball second half can’t live up to.