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Sharper (2023)

Tom is the owner of a used bookstore in New York City. One day, a woman named Sandra comes in looking for a book, and after initially declining his advances, begins a romance with him. Weeks into their relationship, Sandra tells Tom that her brother is in debt and must pay $350,000 or be killed. Tom reveals that his father is wealthy, and offers to cover the debt. After he gives the money to Sandra, she disappears, pushing Tom into a nervous breakdown.

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.

The movie begins in the most sublimely innocent way: in a sleepy antiquarian New York bookstore. Gentle bibliophile Tom (Justice Smith), sits behind the counter reading Edgar Allan Poe, and looks up alertly when a (rare) customer comes in: this is the stylish twentysomething Sandra (Briana Middleton) who is after something by Zora Neale Hurston. They get to talking about the PhD she is working on in black feminist studies; he shyly asks her to dinner. One thing leads to another in the happiest of ways – but it seems both of them have unhappy families (the opening to Anna Karenina is repeatedly cited) and Sandra wants to know why they always go to her modest apartment and never to his. A terrible crisis brings the two lovers into traumatic contact with sinuous, predatory city slicker Max (Sebastian Stan), wealthy New York socialite Madeline (Julianne Moore) and her mega-rich husband Richard (John Lithgow)