The Outfit

I went into this with minimal expectations and minimal knowledge of it. I'd seen it pop up on someone's feed, thought it sounded interesting enough to give a shot, and here we are. What I did not expect was to walk away from it with a five-star movie. Certainly not another five-star movie from 2022, which, for my tastes, already had NINE of them before this. It is, hands down, the best year for movies I've ever experienced, it's not even close, and this is another to add to that amazing list. The Outfit is a bottle movie. Except for maybe 30 seconds at the end, the entire movie takes place in the business of a suit maker in Chicago in the mid-50's. Sir Mark Rylance plays Leonard Burling, a kindly old man who runs the shop. His primary clientele is the local Irish Mafia. He has an uneasy arrangement with them with a drop box in the back. The peaceful arrangement breaks down one day when two of them stumble into the shop after hours, one of them shot in the stomach, and Leonard has to get through the night alive with only his wits to save him. A movie like this would die if it didn't have excellent performances and whip-smart writing, and boy howdy, does it ever. Since there is very minimal action, almost everything about this movie's story is propelled through dialogue and facial expressions, and everybody, and I do mean everybody, is on their A+ game. Rylance -- an Academy Award winner -- is obviously the anchor here, but that takes away nothing from the rest of the cast; Zoey Deutsch, Johnny Flynn, Dylan O'Brien, and Simon Russell Beale all carry their weight and then some, bringing different personalities, temperaments, and characteristics to a volatile situation that has everybody trying to stay one step ahead of each other. It is a psychological game of cat-and-mouse, except everybody's playing both the cat and the mouse at any given moment. I don't want to give away a ton, and I certainly don't want to oversell this, as if my star rating hasn't done that already. If you're into movies that are heavy on acting and subtlety and schemes and mental chess, this is the movie for you. Gripping and intense but low-key, character-driven instead of action-driven, The Outfit is a fantastic slow burn thriller for a Sunday afternoon.