★★☆☆☆
A botched home robbery leaves two amateur burglar sisters trapped inside a palatial home as the clock runs down on them.
Drag has a nasty, tightly-wound premise. A reluctant amateur burglar, Lucy DeVito (also on producing duty alongside Danny DeVito and what looks like half the family), is talked into a break-in by her sister, Lizzy Caplan, and then has to drag that sister back out of the palatial house after Caplan throws her back out mid-job, dark farcical complications multiplying as the clock runs down.
Drag is carried by committed performances and a willingness to push its central indignity further than most films would dare, leaning into a queasy, irreverent tone thick with horrible slapstick violence, chasing laughs right up to the edge and over it. Over it, unfortunately, in one specific way: a recurring thread that turns a roofie into a punchline. A woman playing goofy because she has been drugged simply doesn’t fit the flippant register the film is reaching for, and what should feel transgressive keeps collapsing into something flat and uncomfortable. That’s a real shame, because elsewhere the readiness to get bleaker than you expect is refreshing.
Your mileage may also vary on Lizzy Caplan hollering in pain, which is a great deal of the runtime; for me it wore thin fast. There is a leaner, meaner comedy of injury trying to get out of this, and enough nerve on show to suggest DeVito and Caplan could find it with a tighter script. As it stands, this is a queasy, uneven curio for strong-stomached fans of cringe and cruelty.
Drag played at Tubi FrightFest in London.