Kevin James did nazi this coming!
Home invasion thrillers usually test the resilience of the adults in the mix. Becky shifts the burden onto a 13-year-old and dares its villains – and us – to underestimate her.
Teenager Becky (Lulu Wilson) is reluctantly spending the weekend at her family’s lakeside cabin with her widower father Jeff (Joel McHale) and his new girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) when their strained attempts at family blending are violently interrupted by a group of escaped convicts led by the ruthless Dominick (Kevin James). As the gang search the property for something hidden, their plans start to come unravelled in the face of an unprecedented teenage tantrum.
The set-up feels familiar: an isolated home, an invading gang, a reluctant protagonist forced into action but Becky takes the Home Alone blueprint and strips away the cartoon padding. Where Kevin McCallister’s booby traps left villains dazed and soot-blackened, Becky’s improvisations leave bodies broken, bloodied and bereft of life. There’s the same mischievousness of spirit, but its shorn of slapstick and sharpened with vicious sincerity.
Wilson rises to the challenge of the role of Becky with startling conviction. Already familiar to horror fans from her turns as the possessed Doris Zander in Ouija: Origin of Evil, the orphan Linda in Annabelle: Creation, and young Shirley Crain in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, she brings Becky to life not as a precocious action caricature but as a furious, grieving child who channels that anger into lethal focus, her rage at the loss of her mother and the general unfairness of the world finding a righteous target. What makes it all work is the savagery she brings to Becky’s counterattacks: the resourcefulness of a teenager fused with the fury of someone who has no illusions about what’s at stake and nothing left to lose. Each kill lands like a grisly punchline, darkly witty in its execution but never less than brutal.
Kevin James, meanwhile, provides a counterpoint that works precisely because it is so straight-faced. Best known for his affable sitcom persona in The King of Queens and the broad antics of Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Grown Ups, he buries every instinct for levity beneath Dominick’s blunt menace. He doesn’t camp it up, and he doesn’t overplay the villainy – which makes his exchanges with Wilson’s Becky all the more unsettling. With limited screentime, McHale and Brugel bring credibility to the would-be-family dynamic, but the film belongs to the duel between Becky and Dominick, and the escalating desperation of their conflict.
Directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion orchestrate it all with pace and clarity, understanding that the genre thrives on both tension and release and the rollercoaster ride between the two. The violence is witty without being glib, knowingly poking fun at the audience’s hankering for borderline Loony Tunes anarchism before replacing them with consequences that draw genuine winces, Home Alone without the guardrails.
At a lean ninety-three minutes, Becky wastes little time moralising or sanding down its rough edges and doesn’t pretend to reinvent the home invasion thriller, instead finding freshness in the centring of its young pouty protagonist and pursuing that angle with unapologetic relish. In a genre defined by adult endurance, Becky’s resourcefulness and ingenious brutality carve out a space that feels new, and more importantly, eminently justified.
