Sara Stewart

Sara Stewart

Movies

‘Some Velvet Morning’ rife with emotional manipulation

This latest entry in the Neil LaBute misanthropy canon is an hour and a half of emotional manipulation seasoned with a dash of straight-up violence. Minus its smirky twist ending, it’d make perfect material for New York’s new “That’s Abuse” domestic violence awareness campaign.

Velvet (Alice Eve) gets an unexpected knock at her door: It’s her former lover Fred (Stanley Tucci), suitcase in hand, announcing he’s finally left his wife. Velvet, unimpressed, moves from humoring his relentless interrogation to actively trying to get him to leave. You know there’s something brewing underneath this exchange, but the surface is so cruel and ugly, it quickly becomes hard to care.

Eve and Tucci, capable and engaging, dig into their roles — she’s a self-contained, chilly young woman, he’s a needy, insufferable jerk. But LaBute trademarks, so novel in early films like “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors,” feel played out now: the endless, narcissistic badgering, the heated conversations that stretch way past the point of reasonability — even for what feels like a play.

In LaBute’s world, no one ever just has enough and walks out, though that’s just what I longed to do.