THE TUTOR - Mark Reviews Movies

The Tutor, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 23, 2023

With his screenplay for The Tutor, the main questions for writer Ryan King seem to be how much to reveal and when those revelations should come. The tactic of holding off to tell us what's really happening here—and, then, what's actually happening beneath that layer—certainly keeps us uncertain about the truth behind this situation, these relationships, and these characters. It also, though, keeps us more uncertain about why we should care about any of those things.

The central figure is Ethan (Garrett Hedlund), a star employee at a tutoring company that seems to specialize in getting the kids of the wealthy and the privileged prepared for standardized tests. He's good at his job, and at home, Ethan is dating Annie (Victoria Justice), who's pregnant with the couple's first child.

The premise of director Jordan Ross' movie has Ethan offered a prime gig, tutoring a teenage boy for a couple hours—and a couple thousand dollars—per day, along with room and board for the week at the family's remote mansion. Ethan can't pass up that kind of money at this point in his life, and when he meets his student Jackson (Noah Schnapp), the job seems even easier. The kid doesn't appear to need tutoring to succeed on his tests.

Nothing, really, seems out of the ordinary, in fact, and because the filmmakers want to hide so much from us, the movie initially struggles to even aim us in some direction of focus, interest, or concern. Some of the developments are fairly obvious. Jackson's father is nowhere to be seen, and his cousin (played by Jonny Weston) hangs around with an air of menace and some younger women who seem to exist for Ethan to leer at in a not-so-secret way.

To describe Hedlund's performance in a complimentary way would probably give away the movie's game, but until all of that becomes apparent, there's very little to find compelling or sympathetic with either the character or the performance. It almost seems as if Annie, the loyal and doting girlfriend at home, is intended to do some of the work of giving Ethan some kind of quality. After all, she's with the guy, and Justice's performance possesses enough sweetness and charm that there has to be something about Ethan to attract him to someone like this woman.

Eventually, even her character becomes a means of providing either evidence about what's really happening or yet another distraction from the truth at the core of this matter. There's a reason she's jealous and suspicious of her boyfriend, who lets her keep track of his cellphone whenever he's away. Maybe that obvious plot device actually does come into play at a key point in this story, or perhaps, it doesn't matter, because a simple explanation for how certain characters end up at a specific location for the climactic showdown pales in comparison to the other messes created by that scene.

Meanwhile, Jackson himself becomes increasingly erratic in his behavior, as well as inconsistent, because any kind of clarity, it seems, might give away too much information too soon. At times, he's apathetic toward the whole setup. At others, he is dismissive and insulting toward Ethan (literally throwing money at him), uncomfortably attached to the man in a creepy way, or putting on displays of overt anger toward his tutor and himself. Broadly, all of this makes a bit of sense by the third act, but at that point, the limitations of Jackson's character and Schnapp's performance run into a whole new set of issues.

In case it isn't clear yet, the movie does lead up to a significant twist. Obviously, the act of even mentioning the presence of such a gimmick might lead one to anticipate or try to predict what's coming in the story. However, it's difficult to imagine anyone actually figuring this one out ahead of time, based on the information—or, more accurately, the lack thereof—given to us by this screenplay, these performances, and the way Ross leads us there with clues. One would probably have to cheat, either with a pure guess or by some other means, to confidently say how the plot of The Tutor will resolve itself, but that's far from a compliment to the filmmakers. They do plenty of cheating, too, making this a confounding experience on both narrative and thematic levels.

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