When so much real terror is stalking nursing
homes, the timing of “I Care a Lot” (it debuts
Friday on Netflix) is perhaps not ideal. Marla’s
scheme is a particularly loathsome one, and the
feeling of disgust only grows as writer-director
Blakeson, the British filmmaker of the kidnap
thriller “The Disappearance of Alice Creed,”
depicts an interwoven system of elder abuse,
with doctors and nursing home mangers all
taking a cut. One of them hands Marla a “cherry”
— an especially desirable new ward because
she’s both wealthy and lacking any apparent
living family that might interfere — in Jennifer
(Dianne Wiest). A few falsified health records and
a judge’s rubber stamp later, Jennifer is abruptly
hauled off to a facility where her phone is taken
and even straying outside is off limits. Marla and
her partner-girlfriend (Eiza González), quickly
start auctioning off her stuff.
At this point, “I Care a Lot” seems poised
to become another nightmare of wrongful
institutionalization — a “Shock Corridor” for
rest homes. Having Dianne Wiest locked up is
no less infuriating than Jack Nicholson being
strapped into a mental hospital. But the twists
and turns of “I Care a Lot” lead elsewhere —
in more comic, off-balanced but generally
deviously delightful directions.
Jennifer turns out to be not just a meek old lady
living alone but the mother of a powerful and
well-financed underworld figure with ties to the
Russian mafia, Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage).
Dinklage, as he often does, immediately
recalibrates the movie, as Roman summons his
forces — minions who cower before him while
he snacks on an eclair or sips a smoothie — to
free his mother.