There is now a ‘Rosamund Pike film’. One that we have increasingly grown to love. It can be best described as making the devilish delish. The 42-year-old British actor, who has played a Bennet sister and a Bond girl, has managed the almost impossible feat of making the reprehensible — especially when it comes to a woman — look fun on screen. Pike most famously did that with her Amy Dunne in David Fincher’s staggeringly engaging adaptation of the Gillian Flynn bestseller Gone Girl seven years ago. She repeats it — and also runs with it — with Marla Grayson, a character she plays in all its vile and unlikeable glory, in I Care a Lot.

Twisted can be fun

The twisted, dark comedy, now streaming on Netflix, that also doubles as a searing satire on capitalism, rests squarely on the shoulders of Pike, who plays her icy villain to perfection. Marla Grayson, like Amy Dunne, is a devil, most often not in disguise, who believes that for a woman to wrest back control, she can’t be a good girl.

Marla is a hustler who uses her frosty face and stony smile to con hundreds of elderly clients into becoming their caregiver. She forces them, aided by corrupt doctors and greedy old-age home directors, into assisted living facilities, skillfully bleeding them dry of their retirement funds and assets. Partnered by her business associate Fran (played by Eiza Gonzales), who also happens to be her lover, Marla chillingly goes about her business, reveling in her nastiness. She has no one to stop her. Until one day when she lays her eyes on the seemingly helpless Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), only to end up crossing swords with the old woman’s son, a ruthless mob boss, played by Peter Dinklage. The gangster is a formidable opponent to Marla, but then she’s not one to be cowed down so easily. “I won’t lose, I don’t lose,” is something she says more than once in the film, with you, the viewer, ending up trying to root for the lesser evil.

I Care a Lot is consistently entertaining, but it isn’t great cinema, and it often goes off the rails. But Rosamund Pike elevates it to a level, which she has done with some of her recent performances, that merits attention. Her performance alone makes a wafer-thin plot seem strikingly chaotic. It’s an act that has already notched her a Golden Globe nomination this year.

A ‘F***ing lioness’

Pike has ensured that the resilient anti-heroine has faced a resurgence on screen. The opening of I Care A Lot — quite like Gone Girl (in which Amy’s husband Nick, played by Ben Affleck, says that he wants to “crack open her skull” to get into her devious mind) — has a striking monologue from Marla Grayson, which goes something like, “You think you’re good people? I used to be like you. Thinking that working hard and playing fair leads to success and happiness. It doesn’t. Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people to keep the rest of us poor.” In Marla’s world, there are only two types of people: “lions and lambs”. She ends the monologue by calling herself “a f***ing lioness”.

Armed with sharp suits (the ‘Marla Grayson pantsuit’ is reportedly making a killing on online sites) and a sharper bob, her stiletto heels sometimes giving way to designer sneakers, Marla is formidable. Her vape pen is almost a weapon of sorts, with which she blows out smoke through her nostrils, pretty much like a dragon spewing fire. It’s tough to think of anyone but Pike playing this woman who walks in, out and away with the film. “I thought it was a challenge. Can I be totally morally reprehensible and still be fun to watch?” the actor said in a recent interview with Los Angeles Times, pretty much summing up the template that she’s almost singlehandedly brought alive on screen.

Amy vs Marla

Ever since I Care a Lot dropped on the streaming service six days ago, the Internet has been flooded with comparisons between Amy Dunne and Marla Grayson. The two may be cut from the same cloth, but there are some vital differences. Marla is everything Amy wants to be. Amy is a murderer and sociopath, Marla is a hustler whose greedy capitalistic ambitions often end in bloody results. Marla is also far more ambitious than Amy. One look at the scenes in her spin classes, her mind ticking away even as she feverishly pedals away, will tell you that.

Unlike Amy, Marla never uses her sexuality (the scene where she, shivering after rescuing herself from the bottom of a lake, strips down to her underwear in public, is casual and over in a split second), to get by. Marla may be a ruthless, amoral lioness in a world of alpha males, but the same-sex relationship in I Care a Lot is also refreshingly casual, with director Jonathan Blakeson never using it to make a statement.

In describing the influences of the tone and template of I Care a Lot, Blakeson has mentioned films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success and Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Pike, herself, has cited Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in the Scorsese film, a hedonistic mix of sex, drugs and money, as an influence for how she plays Marla Grayson.

Pike has, in recent times, successfully portrayed a portfolio of powerful women, such as the photojournalist Marie Colvin in A Private War and scientist Marie Curie in Radioactive. But it’s the icy anti-heroine act that’s set her star to highest burn. “I think I’m very drawn to characters with mettle. Maybe they just don’t come to me for the nice, simple, sweet girl. There is no such thing as good people. So I’m just gonna get on the bandwagon, I suppose and allow myself some sort of moral indiscretion and enjoy it,” Pike said in her Los Angeles Times interview. She’s having fun playing it. And we are having fun watching her play it.