Critic Reviews

Flower is hilarious one moment, tender the next and takes some surprising turns. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a dynamic lead who steadily navigates the twists with an emotional authenticity that keeps the movie on its bumpy track.

Cruelly amoral and only marginally credible, Flower is nevertheless wildly entertaining and at times even touching.

Even with the ways it handles some dicey thematic material, Flower is an engaging ride that largely serves as a vehicle for the excellent Deutch, and further shines the spotlight on telling stories about empathetic young women.

Doesn’t have a dull frame in it, thanks mainly to the star-making performance of Zoey Deutch, who dazzles the screen as Erica with her mix of humor, sensuality, volatility and vulnerability.

Flower is messy and imperfect and above all else a star-making role for Deutch, who carries this film from funny to tragic and back again.

At times, [Deutch's] performance is perhaps even too strong for the film that’s cobbled together around it, as the actress so convincingly indicates at Erica’s vibrant and complex inner life that she embarrasses the script’s feeble attempts to diagnose and solve her character.

There are two movies here, and the actors handle that duality well. But the brooding darkness lurking inside these characters needs a drama of its own.

Audiences get a collection of great performances, led by a truly exceptional one, in search of a script that’s worthy of them in a movie with so much to offer that disappointingly, but bafflingly, seems determined to add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Mistaking provocation for insight, and failing to sell the presumed heroism of its cunning central character, the movie grows less involving with each step. It can't make Erica Vandross' fate matter, but in Deutch it gives us a motor-mouthed wonder who commands attention.

The film is quite the showcase for Zoey Deutch (“Before I Fall”), giving her loose-scripted freedom to play brazen, breezy, even soulfully vulnerable. Still, her selectively promiscuous hellion is so off-putting so much of the time — as are most of those around her, and their lurid plots and predicaments — it’s hard to see the point of it all.