Two movies about manipulation and unintended consequences — it’s Strangers On A Train vs. The Wasp.
Read The Episode
Every episode of Tasteless, I take a critically acclaimed film and compare it to one that shares the same themes but didn't get the attention it deserves — and explain why that second movie is my pick. This week: two movies about manipulation and unintended consequences. It's Strangers on a Train versus The Wasp. I've been doing a lot of modern movies lately and it's really exciting to still find new movies to love. Part of the impetus of this show was looking at all these movies we consider the best of all time and how weighted it is to the past — it's really hard for us to think of a new movie as the best. We have whatever the opposite of recency bias is. So today we fight for the newer film.
A note: this is a spoilery one. I really want you to watch The Wasp before you read this. I talk about some of the twists a little more vaguely, but I still recommend just watching it first. Unless you're someone who loves to know secrets before you watch a film — like people who read the entire IMDB synopsis for a horror movie, which I've done. Strangers on a Train, however, is decades old, so I'm spoilering the crap out of it.
Strangers On A Train
A psychopath tries to forcibly persuade a tennis star to agree to his theory that two strangers can get away with murder by submitting to his plan to kill the other's most-hated person.
This movie came out in 1951. It has a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Nominated for one Oscar, Best Cinematography for Robert Burks.
Much like the film Gaslight, I had heard of this concept, this conceit, long before I ever saw the movie. I'll do one murder and you do the other — it gave me certain expectations for the film that were mostly incorrect, which I like because it meant the film was still surprising. I don't think you can ever have a bad time watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie, even though the man himself seems insufferable. And this movie made me really want to read Patricia Highsmith's original book because I'm very curious what she did differently, especially coming from a female writer versus this dude.
Speaking of dudes, our protagonist is named Guy. Yeah, his parents were like, what are we gonna call this little guy? Uh-huh, like that's it, we're done. Put it on the certificate. Farley Granger is the actor who plays Guy. He's also in Hitchcock's Rope. When you go to IMDB, there's this column where it tells you what lists an actor has been added to — these are user-created lists. And I saw Farley Granger was on somebody's list called "Queer Peeps." So good for him. That's how I discovered he's a queer peep. He was a hottie, by the way. Usually in these black and white movies I can't tell any of the guys apart, but this guy is very boyishly handsome in a way that plays well with his naïveté throughout the film.
It's interesting to look at this knowing he was queer, because his role is kind of the one that would usually be a female character. He's very much led around by this weird, semi-powerful guy. And then you look around like, well, is it because he was gay?
Robert Walker plays Bruno, the weirdo who's like, hey, I bet two people can murder each other's most hated person. If I kill the person you hate and you kill the person I hate, why would I have any reason to kill your person? I'm not connected to them. So when they're looking for suspects — I bet it was the husband, I bet it was the father — they're not going to look at some guy from the train. Which is not a bad idea.
Bruno — ugh, he's such a creep in a great way. Sort of smarmy, seems cool on the surface, wins people over with a big gag or laugh, then acts sinister and you're like, wait, I thought this guy was cool. And I like that this man being creeped on by another man — that Bruno approaches Guy and takes up his time on the train and Guy is too polite to send him away. It's a specific sort of creepiness that women know is really hard to call out because he's not doing anything wrong. It's just annoying. Like a guy asking you to take out your headphones to talk to you. Obviously the social cues are all saying I don't want to be talking to you, but it's not illegal for you to talk to me anyway.
Bruno is the sort of delicious, weirdly evil role that can set an actor up for life. But unfortunately Robert Walker died not long after this film at only 32. He had a tragic past with alcohol and was allergic to one of the medications they put him on. But this performance is just so iconic. He revels in being this almost clownish figure, super exaggerated in his choices, but still with a winning enough smile that he can be a part of society. And I love when he pops a kid's balloon. Don't let your kid run up to a man in a suit. That guy's got a hat on, don't let your kid go over there.
Now there's an undercurrent of homosexuality to Bruno's characterization as well — his overly flirtatious nature with his mother, how uncomfortable he makes Guy as though they shared an illicit evening instead of Bruno just being like any person on the subway who starts yelling things at you. Everyone seems oddly bewitched by Bruno, including Guy, despite knowing who he is. No one wants to turn against him. And when I say Bruno's characterization is homosexual and then list all these weird things about him, I mean in terms of the 50s — that they're coding this guy for you to see him and think, ooh, a gay guy. That's purposeful. There are elements of that which are obviously frustrating, but there are also elements of this queer subtext that I really like.
Guy's girlfriend Anne, played by Ruth Roman — she is ride or die for Guy. The person Guy wants dead is his wife, because he has a wife and a girlfriend. Bruno's like, I'll kill your wife, you kill my dad. And Guy's like, no thank you sir. So he's cheating on his wife with Anne. Their relationship isn't this passionate love affair — it's really practical. They enjoy spending time together. They're almost bro-y. I love this moment when she finds out Miriam is dead and obviously the assumption is Guy must have done it. She's like, Guy, did you murder your wife? He's like, no, of course I didn't. And she goes, okay. Very much on his side. Like, sounds like you're in a pickle, I got you.
Guy is also not good at plans. He is given a map because Bruno's like, go kill my dad. It's an arrow pointing from the front door down a hall into the third door on the right. And Guy breaks into the house in the dead of night and looks at this map 15 times. You shouldn't need to double-check the map to go down one hall. This isn't the manor from Clue. Memorize it and eat the paper, stupid.
No one is that mad Miriam is dead. No one seemed to like her. When the wife gets killed, everybody's like, yikes, I hope Guy doesn't get in trouble. His wife's dead, sucks.
I was intrigued by the fact that Guy is a tennis player and his tennis rackets in the 50s — they seemed very thin. They looked like badminton rackets. Have we been getting thicker in our tennis rackets and why? Has our tennis technology gotten more complicated?
Patricia Hitchcock plays Anne's nerd sister, who was like the original murderino — I would love to know about a strangling, how sexy! I respect that apparently she didn't get favoritism on set. The cast said Alfred treated her just like everybody. But she did get the role and she did get to direct her dad in his cameo, so that's a little favoritism. I don't think if it was a random actress, Alfred would be like, you know what? I think the woman playing the protagonist's side piece's sister should direct my scene.
I was trying to get more context on this film because obviously it's been studied and Hitchcock is always so innovative. So I searched on my podcast app for "Strangers on a Train" because I like to listen to other movie podcasts talking about the stuff I don't hit. When you search for Strangers on a Train, it's just a bunch of audio porn of that scenario where two strangers on a train bone. So there's a lot of that out there. I would recommend watching the movie first. It's on Tubi. It's fine. It's a good time.
The Wasp
Follows Heather and Carla, who meet after having not spoken in years. Heather is about to present a very unexpected proposition that could change their lives forever.
This movie came out in 2024. It has a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a good time.
I personally love a movie based on a play, especially when the original playwright is the one that adapts it to the screen. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's dialogue is incredibly slick. She writes in the way people talk, but it's elevated — there's a cleverness that doesn't take you out of the world. It's not things you only find on a page and not in real life, but it is a step above just day-to-day conversation. I saw there's a paperback of the play available online. I'll have to snag it because I'm very curious how she wrote the original piece.
Everything is layered and also leaves room for the actors to deliver things with a little bit of extra charge. It's so fully realized, but also very contained. It's a perfect story — the structure of it is just fantastic. I've seen the film twice now. The first time I really liked it. The second time, knowing how it goes, is like a completely different experience — enjoyable in a new way, seeing which dominoes are being set up before you watch them get knocked down.
A couple of exchanges caught my ear. Naomi Harris plays Heather, and she's asked Carla, played by Natalie Dormer, to meet her to discuss something. She says to Carla, you haven't changed a bit. Carla says, you have. And there's some back and forth and Heather's like, God, I hope so, sort of nervously laughing. She would never want to be who she was — despite it being exactly what she just accused Carla of. It's this comment that seems nice, but it becomes suddenly less kind when you realize how important it is to Heather that she herself has changed. There are a lot of little moments like that where someone says something one way and it's not that they mean to be deceptive — it's as though they kind of out themselves.
Later, when the two are discussing that Heather cannot get pregnant, Carla says super bluntly: ain't sex working? Me saying "ain't sex working" and hitting the G really hard does not sound as good as it sounds in British. But in British, it's very funny. Carla deflects not just with attitude but with sarcasm, with humor. But it's not a laugh-out-loud line because Heather doesn't think it's funny. The movie gets really dark but it's still very funny — great dark comedy. It works on both levels because it's always riding this line. It's clever but it's not winking at you.
Naomi Harris was nominated for an Oscar for Moonlight and is just superb. I really loved her as Moneypenny in the Daniel Craig Bond films. There's something cool about her — collected — but in this film you also buy into her as the wilting flower, the kid who was led around by the nose by Carla, who can now finally stand up for herself but is cautious about it. She definitely has more of the straight-man role. She's holding it together and she pulled off a plot where you need to believe in her to believe in this film. And you do.
She's emotional but not overly so. Contained but with this roiling beneath her skin. The consummate host who just so happens to keep Carla at her home against her will. You need to believe she is both intimidated by Carla and that she can hold her own here. An element I really enjoyed is how her husband is betraying her — their marriage is going down the tubes — but it's so clear that this betrayal by her friend stings so much more. She's held on to it. And even before you find out the betrayal is much worse than anything you could have imagined, it still feels right. Of course this friendship dissolving is what hangs over her more than this marriage. It doesn't feel out of place that she holds a grudge all these years later.
She has to deliver several incredibly emotional monologues to a mostly unresponsive Carla, and they are still so powerful because you feel the catharsis of her saying what she needs to say.
There's an amazing moment where the two are discussing this Strangers on a Train-esque plot — this is the element that made me think of comparing them — and Carla's saying, okay, I'll stage a robbery, I'll take a few things, make it look real before killing your husband. And Naomi's like, whoa, whoa, whoa — don't take any of my good stuff. I'll lay some stuff out that you can take. You're having your husband killed but you don't want your stuff stolen. That control throughout, even when she's asked Carla to take over committing her crime, she needs things to go just right. It tells you so much about who she is.
Natalie Dormer's Carla is a perfect foil. She leads with her gut and not her mind — quite a turn from the role most know her as, Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones. Carla is very instinctual. She's trying to survive, and with that comes a need to pivot, to not plan, to live life day by day and hope to overcome dire circumstances. Natalie's disaffected looks, her ability to layer that with something more human beneath the surface, make Carla very compelling.
I understand Heather's rage. But I also understand how trapped Carla has felt her entire life, how she did the things she did to feel power, how she wanted to exert control and knew nothing else, no other way to do it. Natalie Dormer has to spend a lot of this film acting without words, just with looks — not even with her mouth — and she excels. She holds herself like a bully until she realizes her usual tactics won't work. This character has a specific toolkit for dealing with problems, but Heather shuts off her emotions, doesn't allow herself to respond to Carla the way she might have as a child.
Carla thinks she has the upper hand and can go along with Heather's games for now. She can get her money and go back to her life. Little does she know she'll be reaping what she sowed. She's so used to bad things happening to her — it's more a fact of life than a consequence of her own actions. Which makes Heather's eventual punishment all the more fitting.
Guillem Morales is the director and he makes this film feel both big and small — retaining the intimacy of a play while expanding the edges of the world, showcasing the wall of framed bugs in Heather's house, following the wasps that plague her. He often frames the women in such a way that it feels like we're intruding on their conversation rather than that their conversation is being had for the viewer. Watch The Wasp. It's not currently streaming anywhere free, but it's well worth a rental. Spend a few bucks, don't be cheap.
Shared Themes
Strangers on a Train and The Wasp are both fascinating cat-and-mouse stories of manipulation and power. One character is almost always lording power over another, especially between our two leads. We have someone preying on the lowest moment of someone else — the perfect time to try to get power.
In Strangers on a Train, Bruno has read all about Guy. He realized Guy is in a tough spot — the papers are gossiping about how he's stepping out on his wife. Bruno knows this problem and offers a solution. He's not approaching a true stranger because he knows there would be a reason for Guy to want someone dead. Bruno takes Guy's sort of vague chitchat as an agreement and heads off to strangle a lady, his favorite pastime.
I honestly don't even think he cared about having his father dead. He wanted to hold power over someone else's future, over their life. Even better than the killing, he gets to lurk around Guy and threaten him and demand he do as he asks. When he pops up out of his dad's bed — I got you, Guy! He put on a little tux to do it. He could have killed his dad for sure, but no, he wants to play with Guy. He wants to have Guy's life in his hands. I could go frame you right now. He loves that.
Having a secret from someone is so powerful. Bruno knows he has strangled people with his hands and these little ladies at the party are like, he's just joking around. Miriam is manipulating Guy too — yeah, I'm never divorcing you, idiot, I'm going to the fair with a couple of hunks. She knows he can't do anything about it. Or she thinks he can't.
In The Wasp, our characters have a history and we see how the power balance between them has changed — how each woman still seeks power in their interactions even as adults. Natalie Dormer's Carla acts disaffected in a bid to separate herself from the emotions brought up by her past. After a difficult childhood, she walled herself off to survive, and I don't blame her for that. But that is, in and of itself, a power play. In any interaction, it's a way to control a situation.
As a child, she was a bully. She led the other girls around and made fun of her friend Heather. Heather was an easy target — she was new, she was quiet. Going after the weak to set yourself up as the alpha is a classic power move. But in the present day, Heather holds power in different ways. She has money. She has information. She knows, much like Bruno knew about Guy, that Carla is in a very vulnerable position. Carla's husband has gambled their money away, they have another kid on the way, she needs money more than she might have at another time.
To truly manipulate, you need to really understand someone. Heather understands Carla in a way that Carla doesn't even understand herself. She leaves nothing to chance.
As much as Bruno is manipulating Guy, he does not know Guy as well as he thinks he does. He knows Guy is at heart a good guy. His name can't be Guy. But Bruno doesn't really care in the same way. He doesn't have the stakes attached to it that Carla and Heather do.
Both films address unintended consequence and moral ambiguity. I love these gray-area films that delve into what personal responsibility we have when things spiral out of our control, away from our expectations.
In Strangers on a Train, Guy never agrees to Bruno's plot, but he kind of considers it for a moment. And I can't even blame him for that. What I can blame him for is then not telling anyone. He's so worried about himself — he won't go to the cops. He's like, I'm worried about my girlfriend's dad, the senator, it could be embarrassing. Sure. But him entertaining this weird man, talking about Miriam at all, it does have the consequences of her death. I'm not saying he made it happen or deserved it, but it's a good look at how such a small interaction can lead to a wild outcome. Guy is ultimately much more worried about himself than about Miriam's death or getting justice. Imagine her poor family.
It seems like the book was much more ambiguous on morality — Guy did kill Bruno's father — and I wish that was still an element here. It's quite a different story without that. Guy in this film is very much painted as the hero. But I really enjoy that it seems like Guy and Anne grow closer when they're both trying to figure out how to stop Bruno together. Which is also probably helped by Miriam being dead, poor Miriam.
In The Wasp — boy. Carla made some horrible, abusive choices as a child. She never thought they would come back to haunt her. And honestly, she probably did not think they would haunt Heather in the way that they did. Her behavior led Heather to be unable to have children. Whether that was for physical or mental reasons, it doesn't matter — it was how Heather's body responded to the trauma.
Even if Carla didn't mean for it to happen, isn't she a monster for what she did? No, I don't think so. It's tough. This is very gray and the story treats it as such. Carla is given time to say her piece. She talks about the abuse she suffered. No one helped her. That does not excuse what she did, but she leads with violence now as she has throughout her life because it's a consequence of how she was raised. And Heather continues her pattern of mostly passive behavior — she lets things play out with the knowledge that she has set up the situation in such a way that Carla will fall to the consequences of her own actions. Heather accepts the consequences of these choices as well.
What I really appreciate is that we don't know the genesis of the animosity between the two until almost the end. The film slow-plays it. To go back and watch with that new information gives you a totally different viewing experience that is just as entrancing as watching it blind.
And I love the grayness of this thing. I cannot handle animals being killed in films. There's a scene with a pigeon. The pigeon is injured and the kind thing to do is put it out of its misery. But that's still taking action — trolley problem style. You're still ending a life even if it's for a greater good. We see everyone expect Carla, the bully, the tough one, to kill this pigeon because of who they think she is. And we see how after she does, she's left alone. She did a hard thing and everyone abandoned her for it.
But there's such depth to this. It's not cheating the character. It's showing a real moment that has stuck with both these women for very different reasons. To see how Carla remembers this thing that Heather has pointed to as proof that Carla's a bad seed — and Carla remembers it so differently, how alone she was. It's played so well. You see these characters' essences distilled in a fully different way than had been previously presented.
What The Wasp Does Better
What is so enticing about The Wasp is that the characters are on much more equal footing throughout — until the rug is pulled out from under the viewer and from Natalie Dormer as Carla. It makes the film more tense and thrilling, whereas Strangers on a Train, despite its clever construction and innovative camera work and just the cool idea of let's kill each other's people, is a much more straightforward story. You know what's going to happen.
In Strangers on a Train, we know Bruno's a freak, we know he's killed Miriam, we know Guy is worried about getting in trouble. There aren't surprises except ones that don't have bearing on how we view the story. When Bruno pops up out of his dad's bed to surprise Guy, it's a fun twist, but it doesn't affect how we view Guy or Bruno. When Bruno stalks and kills Miriam — we've watched him stalk her for ages. When he reveals he's willing to drop the lighter to frame Guy — unsurprising, he sucks. His goal is chaos, and maybe for his dad to be dead, but more so chaos.
There's not push and pull so much as push, push, push from Bruno while Guy wrings his hands. The carousel fight scene is thrilling because it's action-packed, but I was more worried for the 200-year-old man who climbed under the carousel than for Guy or for any of the children riding the horses. I just knew nothing would happen.
In The Wasp, you are on uneven ground throughout the entire film. When you first see these women reunite, Naomi Harris is a little shady as Heather — a bit odd, but perfectly presented as this upper-crusty beaten-down wife. Natalie Dormer's Carla is standoffish and clearly doesn't make the best choices but is more of a fun time. Preconceived notions of these two women work in the film's favor. It keeps the viewer guessing. You wonder how the two were ever friends. Flashbacks show a highly unbalanced relationship reminiscent of a Regina George and Cady Heron.
And I wonder how men react to this because I see that flashback as a woman and so fully understand how they're friends. Like, of course. Of course they were friends.
What's impressive is nothing ever feels out of character. Nothing feels done for the sake of story rather than character. These are living, breathing people dealing with their own lives and traumas in different ways, and they've hurt each other in doing so. They're so intertwined — and they don't have to be. There was a world in which they never saw each other again.
Something that bummed me out about Strangers on a Train — it's so straightforward in many ways, and it's that clear villain-and-hero path that makes the film less compelling for me than The Wasp, where we see two women who are each the villain of the other's story. And neither is wrong in that belief.
In Strangers on a Train, you are never in any doubt of what Bruno is willing to do to amuse himself, and that Guy's morality will generally win out. If someone sides with Bruno watching this — there you go, he's wrong, he's the bad guy, there's nothing to save, nothing to redeem. And Guy is so moral to a fault — I hate that they changed it from the book, that he was capable of murder in the book and he isn't in the film. Even his cheating is hand-waved away. You can't get in a paddleboat with two men in the 50s.
The Wasp has no definitive villain. It speaks to what's inside all of us. What can happen with a few wrong turns in life that might not even be turns we took on purpose. And it explores what can happen when you feel wronged.
Natalie Dormer's Carla looks at Heather and sees someone who got everything she could never have — a loving family growing up, a beautiful house as an adult, a husband, free time. Naomi Harris's Heather sees Carla as someone who took from her, someone who felt strong, someone who did what they wanted while she waited around. Someone who can easily grow her family while Heather feels barren and alone. Carla has freedom, in her mind, that she doesn't have. And vice versa.
I think neither of these women won, if we're thinking of it as Batman vs. Superman. But because they're so fully realized, I could have seen a few different endings and I wouldn't have been disappointed — because the payoff for the characters is there throughout. They're complicated women. Neither has the moral high ground. Both see the world only through their perspective. And it's an impressive feat to have the viewer see both sides.
The ending as it is, is pretty perfect. It's handled really well. It could have gone a few different ways and I wouldn't have been like, no, because I was so on this ride with them that whatever these women chose to do, I'm on board.
Go watch The Wasp. Rent it. I love a two-hander. I love a play-turned-movie. I love a thriller. So many things came together. It's like this one was made for me.
Hit me up at @tastelesspod on social media so we can talk Naomi Harris and Natalie Dormer, or about how when you search for "Strangers on a Train" in the podcast app, it's all audio porn.
