The Wasp, a thriller featuring a Game of Thrones star, sets up a thrilling psychological trial of strength, the outcome of which nobody can foresee at the beginning.
The Wasp proves that the titular wasp is an animal with plenty of thriller potential: In Guillem Morales’ movie, the insect is locked in a jar right at the beginning and then squashed. But we also get to know a second insect subspecies shortly afterwards: The spider-eating Tarantula Hawk Wasp (lat. Pepsis grossa) hangs framed in the main character’s hallway.
This wasp lays its eggs (a.) in tarantulas, which are then eaten alive from the inside out by the insect offspring. Their sting causes (b.) three minutes of agony before the pain subsides without a fatal outcome. With this deliberately scattered information, the successful psychological thriller provides two possible outcomes for its hook-laden story
In the psychological thriller The Wasp, an insect becomes a metaphor for betrayal
Of course, The Wasp is not just about insects, but primarily about people. Dissatisfied humans. Heather (Naomie Harris) has a wealthy, secure existence, but is unhappy with her childlessness and her husband. Carla (Natalie Dormer), on the other hand, lives at the other end of the social spectrum and has constant money problems with four, soon to be five children, a good-for-nothing husband and her supermarket job, which even drive her into prostitution.
Heather and Carla were friends at school. Back then, Heather watched Carla kill an injured pigeon. Years later, this gives her the idea to approach her old friend with an astonishing offer: 50,000 pounds sterling (approx. 60,000 euros) for the murder of her husband. Carla can’t believe this audacious offer at first. But then the two begin to plan together.
The Wasp owes the fact that the subsequent dark story with its constant new twists and turns works above all to its two convincing leading actresses.
Successful duel: Game of Thrones vs. James Bond star
Natalie Dormer was no defenceless princess in Game of Thrones as Margaery Tyrell in the dangerous intrigues at court. Naomie Harris also played Moneypenny in the three James Bond films Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die. The two actresses take up the echoes of these iconic roles in The Wasp – by bending them and playing with our expectations.
Because even though Heather and Carla initially pull together for the planned murder, there are other old wounds lurking beneath the surface of The Wasp that suddenly open up and unexpectedly change the direction of the thriller. Harris’ snobbish affluent lady and Dormer’s weary lower-class mother could easily degenerate into caricatures here. But they don’t, because the two strong actresses ground the thriller’s increasingly unbelievable twists and turns with their believable performances
They draw us into a clever interplay of sympathies. We want their cold childhood friendship to rekindle as they pass the ball to each other while planning the murder and role-play their reactions to “accidentally” discovered corpses and police calls. The thriller becomes all the more painful afterwards, because with every new twist it demands that we sometimes back one character and sometimes the other.
The Wasp is a powerful psychological thriller with a female focus
The Wasp is an insect with female connotations and by no means one with a positive reputation. The Wasp builds on this metaphor with two very different women to create a thriller full of twists and turns in which men become secondary
Whether affairs or other marital inadequacies: Even Heather’s husband Simon (Dominic Allburn), the target of the murder plot, remains deliberately interchangeable. The specific offenses that drive Heather to her plan are of secondary importance. This is because it is more important for the film to tell the story of the duel at the center through the psyche of its main female characters.
In the majority of thrillers, we get to deal with murdering men and sacrificed women. The Wasp turns this arrangement on its head by plunging its sting into the flesh of two female protagonists – who can be planners and instinctual beings, perpetrators and victims at the same time. And that makes The Wasp a captivating thriller in the end. Literally
