Review: Plucked (2026)

In Usher Morgan and Katie Vincent’s Plucked, a marriage comes apart under the conventions of Gilded Age New York, where domestic unhappiness must contend with the demands of social decorum. 

Katherine Greene (Vincent) wants a divorce from her husband, Peter (Jared Canfield), whose insistence on the sanctity of marriage seems inseparable from his desire to remain master of his household. The trouble begins on the evening of an important dinner party Peter has arranged. What should be an exercise in upper-class hospitality becomes a reckoning with the grievances that polite society has long kept out of sight.

The film’s premise is its strongest asset. Morgan and Vincent establish the couple’s estrangement early, then use the dinner party as a pressure cooker in which private resentments acquire increasingly public consequences. The writing has a taste for wicked reversals, repeatedly encouraging us to anticipate one outcome before delivering another. As the evening descends into farce and violence, the rituals of civility begin to look less like safeguards against disorder than elaborate ways of concealing it.

The central conflict, however, is more complicated than a simple contest between an unhappy wife and an unreasonable husband. Peter understands marriage as a promise that ought to secure his place in the world. He wants a family, a home, and the authority to feel like the man of the house. Katherine, meanwhile, has spent years discovering the cost of a life in which her own desires count for less than the role she has agreed to perform. 

Their arguments expose the unequal assumptions beneath their shared domestic life. Peter sees Katherine’s departure as an act of betrayal; she sees his appeals to marital duty as another attempt to deny her autonomy. Neither is free of self-interest, and the film is at its most compelling when their competing accounts of suffering resist easy moral distinctions. Yet its period setting occasionally feels more like a theatrical frame for contemporary grievances than a fully realised social world. The historical circumstances that make divorce such a consequential decision could have been explored with greater specificity.

The first half sometimes labours its confrontations, returning to familiar accusations long enough for the dramatic tension to slacken. The accumulation eventually pays off, though, as the second half gathers momentum and the film’s dark comedy acquires a sharper, more dangerous edge. The playful musical cues and the cinematography’s use of night lighting give the dinner sequence an increasingly unstable atmosphere, while the editing helps propel the action towards its violent absurdities. Vincent and Canfield ground the escalating spectacle in a relationship whose intimacy has curdled into mutual recrimination.

Plucked is less persuasive as a historical critique than as a black comedy about the ways people turn their grievances into moral justifications. Its characters cling to the conviction that they have been wronged, even when defending themselves requires inflicting further harm. The film understands that the desire to escape one’s confinement can coexist with the impulse to imprison someone else. Its most unsettling suggestion is that civility does not necessarily restrain cruelty. Sometimes, it merely teaches cruelty how to behave at the dinner table.