“Alice, Darling” is a little but increasingly tense psychological drama about a young woman struggling with her toxic relationship with her abusive boyfriend. She desperately wants to look away from what she has suffered, but her mind and body do not lie, and that becomes more evident to not only herself but also a few figures around her when she happens to get a chance to get away from her boyfriend for a while.

At first, the movie shows us how Alice (Anne Kendrick) has tried to maintain her relationship with her boyfriend Simon (Charlie Carrick). They have lived in the Manhattan borough of New York City, and Simon has been a new prominent young artist to watch, but it gradually dawns upon us that Alice is not as happy or fine as she pretends on the surface. For example, she often has to tolerate her boyfriend’s narcissistic ego, but he only shows more of his mentally abusive sides while also emphasizing how much he loves her.

Frequently finding herself on the edge due to her boyfriend’s abuse and manipulation, Alice eventually decides to tell a little lie to him on one day. She was recently invited to a cottage at a remote forest lake area where she can have a private rest along with her two close friends, and she lies to her boyfriend that she will be absent for a while due to her “business trip”.

After she arrives at the cottage along with her two close friends Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn) and Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku), Alice seems to feel a better than before, but, not so surprisingly, she still trembles inside due to her boyfriend’s toxic influence. She cannot help but think of how he may react if he ever happens to learn of her little lie, and that makes her all the more nervous. She accordingly shows more alarming signs of emotional anxiety, and it does not take much time for both Tess and Sophie to discern that something is not so right with Alice.

Nevertheless, without asking too much, Tess and Sophie try to make Alice feel comfortable as much as possible, and we get a series of little relaxing moments as Alice allows herself to enjoy herself a bit along with her two friends. Although the recent incident of a local missing girl sometimes disturbs her mind for understandable reasons, Alice and her friends join the volunteer search for that missing girl when there is not much else to do, and that seems to make her reflect more on how her life is going at present.

However, Alice’s mind is still stuck with her boyfriend, whose imagined presence in her mind becomes more frightening along the story. His cruel words often make her mind feel bad or guilty, and she comes to show more of emotional stress no matter how much she tries to pretend in front of her friends that everything is fine and okay.

In the end, there comes a point where Alice’s friends cannot possibly ignore whatever their friend is struggling with. At one point later in the story, Alice becomes quite panic when she happens to lose a gift from her boyfriend, and that makes Tess and Sophie more convinced that their friend really needs help right now. While letting her stay more at the cottage, they have her slowly open herself more to them, and they surely show some sympathy and support after eventually learning about what she has suffered due to her toxic boyfriend.

Thanks to some good influence from Tess and Sophie, Alice shows a little progress toward the possible recovery, but Anna Kendrick, who demonstrates well a more serious side of her talent here, constantly conveys to us the growing tension inside her character’s traumatized mind. While she finally comes to realize that what she has felt bad about her boyfriend is not wrong at all, her mind remains a captive of his toxic influence to some degree, and, thanks to Kendrick’s believable performance, you will come to have more understanding on how people often cannot easily get away from their toxic relationship.

What the hell, I must confess here that I had my own experience with toxic relationship early in this year, and I really understand Alice’s tricky emotional struggle along the story. As a matter of fact, her increasingly agitated state of mind later in the film triggered a traumatic personal memory of how much I trembled and conflicted when I was finally about to declare the end of the relationship to a guy who, to put it mildly, mistreated me a lot for five months even though he was supposed to be my boyfriend.

The movie also reminds that it is always helpful to have some good friends in your private life, who may help and support you a lot as you struggle with a toxic relationship. As Alice’s two close friends, Kaniehtiio Horn and Wunmi Mosku provide the stable ground for Alice’s anxiety and her following gradual recovery, and they and Kendrick are effective enough to overcome some artificial aspects of the finale. On the opposite, Charlie Carrick is insidiously threatening even though his character mostly hovers over the film, and the mood certainly becomes more tense when his character enters the screen as expected during the last act.

In conclusion, “Alice, Darling” is worthwhile to watch thanks to director Mary Nighy’s competent direction, screenplay writer Alanna Francis’s sensitive and thoughtful writing, and Kendrick and several few other main cast members’ solid acting. While it should be introduced with a trigger warning to anyone who has ever suffered toxic relationship, the movie makes us have more understanding and compassion to unfortunate people like Alice, and that is what good psychological drama films can do in my inconsequential opinion.