Besties is a thriller-drama about two teenage girls who share a dark secret they don’t want anyone else to uncover. The movie opens up prior to this with Sandy, one of the girls, thinking about her admiration of the older Ashley, her next door neighbor and how she wants to be popular one day just like her. So she jumps at the opportunity to have Ashley babysit her when her father tells her he’s going away on a trip, and since Ashley knows it’s going to be an empty house she agrees to it. Of course Ashley’s goal wasn’t to babysit Sandy but to have a house party and she does with Sandy just being happy to have all the popular kids there from school. However it’s eventually shutdown by police due to a noise complaint and underage drinking but they let everyone go. And when it’s just Ashley and Sandy winding down for the night they receive an unexpected visitor: Ashley’s ex-boyfriend Justin who recently just got out of prison. Ashley isn’t happy to see him when she remembers everything they got into and why he was sent to prison, and Sandy gets manipulated in a similar fashion Ashley was 2 years ago. When Justin becomes violent with them one thing leads to another and Justin ends up dead on the floor at the hands of Ashley and Sandy. Instead of calling police they decide to dump the body and keep this secret between them. But when the heat is turned up after the body is discovered, can their newfound close relationship be sustained with this dark secret?

The premise of this movie was somewhat intriguing to me from the standpoint of Ashley and Sandy trying to maintain the secret of the murder they committed and it was described as being similar to the thriller Single White Female. So I wanted to see how these different elements came together, and it started off simple enough. Sandy’s lack of a mother in her life was used as part of the justification for her admiration of Ashley, and the other reason was because of Ashley’s popularity and Sandy wanting to be just as popular. Sandy’s father going away and the two of them throwing a party wasn’t a unique situation but it did provide the mechanism for them to get caught up in the situation that would be the basis for this movie so that wasn’t an issue. And when Justin arrives at the house there is a deeper backstory regarding his relationship with Ashley and that involves statutory rape, selling drugs, and with Ashley’s non-existent relationship with her troubled father eventually being revealed, this gave some depth to the characters. And Justin’s threats to her that he could go to the police and detail her involvement in his previous activities were believable in the sense that Ashley wouldn’t necessarily know what were lies and she would be more concerned with how much damage those revelations could inflict on her personal life. And with his manipulation of Sandy it was easy to see how something like this was done to Ashley previously. So when Justin becomes violent and they end up killing him I was enjoying how these events were unfolding. And it was believable that Ashley and Sandy would respond the way they did because they were in the moment and also Ashley wouldn’t even want her current boyfriend to know she was ever involved with Justin. She believed that if he did her future career plans would be destroyed because his father was crucial in that.

And I appreciated how Sandy and Ashley didn’t instantly become criminal masterminds and know exactly how to dispose of a body because it made their confusion about what to do more believable. The pace slowed down somewhat after this as Besties started to focus more on the relationship between the two of them with the older Ashley eventually wanting to use her influence on Sandy to keep her in line. But there were some genuine moments between the two of them so it wasn’t all black and white because eventually it would be difficult to tell whether it was manipulation or genuine on Ashley’s part. And Sandy started to transform from the innocent girl she was to struggling with alcohol and her conscience. Despite that the story was more of a drama than a thriller and so instead of interesting scenarios where this dark secret was on the verge of being revealed or one of the two go off the deep end as a result of maintaining this, it was more methodical and at times slow. It was an interesting angle to have Sandy become close to Justin’s brother as their relationship provided a different angle for the characters to be explored and any potential guilt by showing the ramifications on family members. So there was nothing in particular that made the story engrossing for me but the interactions and acting were at the very least decent. But the potential was lost to me as the story started to feel uneventful overall, became predictable and inevitably safe. There is a message in here about popularity and being oneself however it could’ve been a message delivered under more entertaining circumstances and more reflective of some of the darker elements in the story line.

SUMMARY Besties is an ok movie that squandered its potential to be a suspenseful thriller by focusing more on the drama elements and so outside of the character development and interactions the story felt uneventful at times.  The characters backstories were intriguing and a good job was done in showing their motivations. The acting was decent to really good depending on the situation but I would have liked to see them in more intense situations considering the subject matter. And so what the movie intends to be it does it well and so the coming of age aspect of the story line should be more appealing to its target audience.