Mark Reviews Movies: ABOVE SUSPICION (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 6, 2021

There's a fairly significant story being told in Above Suspicion, although one has to wait until the movie's climax to know what that story is. It begins, as a few film noirs do, with voice-over narration from a dead person. She was killed, and the central question is who did the killing.

Chris Gerolmo's screenplay (based on Joe Sharkey's non-fiction book of the same name) doesn't quite treat this is a mystery, although a portrayal of the actual investigation into the woman's murder might have evaded some of the issues of this dramatization of the events leading up to her death. By the end of the first act, there are a good number of people who might have wanted or would eventually want Susan Smith (Emilia Clarke) out of the picture.

She's a drug dealer, always on the lookout for more ways of making money. Her ex-husband, with whom she still lives, is both the jealous—of other men—and envious—of her success—type, and with his proclivity toward outbursts of violence, that's a deadly combination. The boyfriend of a woman renting a room in Susan's mobile home near Pikeville, Kentucky, is a bank robber. That may seem unrelated to Susan's eventual demise, except that she decides to turn informant on the guy.

Gerolmo and director Phillip Noyce build up this labyrinth of entanglements, illegal and corrupt activity, and potential motives, and what's both fascinating and frustrating is that the movie's version of Susan more or less brings all of her troubles—save for her murder, of course—upon herself. She's selfish, apathetic to everyone around her, and so certain that she's deserving of a better life that she'll do just about anything to get it.

We're not necessarily meant to sympathize with the Susan of this movie, just as we're certainly not meant to sympathize with the other major character. He's Mark Putnam (Jack Huston), an up-and-coming and determined FBI agent, who arrives in Pikeville with his wife Kathy (Sophie Lowe) and the couple's newborn baby. He's just as egotistical, uncaring, and entitled as Susan. That might be why they hit it off as quickly and as recklessly—not to mention, for him, unethically—as they do. The only difference is that Mark has the weight of the law on the side of his self-centered and destructive ambitions.

An examination of the similarities and the central dichotomy—mainly in terms of their power, but also their socioeconomic positions—of these characters could have been compelling. Instead, the story here is primarily concerned with the various schemes of both of its far-less-than-agreeable characters, as each one uses the other for what each one wants. It's mostly miserable and dispiriting—but not in a way that reveals much about these people, their situations, or the abuse of power that results in so much calamity.

Susan wants out of Pikeville. She has wanted that for a long time, but she married Cash (Johnny Knoxville) after becoming pregnant (They have two kids, and neither of the parents seems to care a lick about them). She started using and selling drugs, and Mark shows up at her door after a drug party results in a fatal shooting outside Susan's mobile home.

Initially, Cash offers to give up information on the higher-up drug dealers, but Mark, who also wants out of this place when he rises through the FBI ranks, knows that Susan is the real brains of the operation. With her information, Mark learns a little about the local drug trade and even arrests the bank robber living in her house.

Their relationship becomes sexual, but when an even bigger arrest opportunity arrives, Mark stops seeing or responding to Susan. She saw him as a way out of this place and into a better life, and Susan isn't letting go of that idea easily.

We don't learn much about either Susan or Mark, except that they're both expert liars and manipulators. Mark uses Susan for information and sex, until she's no longer useful to him. Susan injects herself into Mark's personal life, becoming friends with Kathy (who seems like an oasis of decency, until matters get really out of control), and works to interfere with his more substantial investigation.

It's never clear if the filmmakers are taking a side, since Susan, in addition to providing the voice for the narrative, is presented as much a victim of her circumstances (poverty and drug addiction) as a master schemer and Mark, despite his obvious and multiple transgressions, is portrayed as someone trying to atone for his errors. The hesitation in selecting either of them as a character whose motives or actions we can support is understandable. Neither of them seems worthy, and clearly knowing that, Gerolmo and Noyce simply don't make a choice. For what it's worth, both Clarke and Huston are convincing as their increasingly caustic and self-destructive characters.

Whatever point the filmmakers are trying to make here is also lost in that indecisiveness. The situation depicted in Above Suspicion is a mess, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to make some sense of its cause and effects.

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