Final Rating: 3.5/5
In Drag, a woman throws her back out in the middle of a burglary. Now unable to move, she must rely on her sister to drag her out of the house and back to the getaway vehicle before the owner returns.
The film features Lizzy Caplan as the unnamed older sister with back pain. Caplan is commanding despite her character’s utter helplessness. While she’s restricted to acting almost entirely with her face, Caplan repeatedly turns scowls into gold. Left at the mercy of her environment, her emotions carry extra weight. Her fear becomes terror, her anger becomes rage, disappointment in herself feels like the worst feeling anyone’s ever had.
Directors Raviv Ullman and Greg Yagolnitzer establish the layout of the house early on, making sure to set up little obstacles to take advantage of the lead’s immobility. A prominently displayed vase is bumped into repeatedly due to its awkward positioning in the middle of a hallway. A small nail sticking out of a hardwood floor is shown from multiple angles early on, setting it up as the film’s first major obstacle. One sequence near the end has Caplan scrambling to knock a frying pan off a kitchen counter.
The lead’s sister (Lucy DeVito) is stuck carrying her sibling through life. As a moderately-successful restaurateur with a family, she’s just barely in a position to support her sister monetarily, and too kind to say no when her sister goads her into helping her rob a famous artist.
In conversations, it’s quite clear that her sister’s various schemes and turbulent lifestyle are an albatross around her neck. Once Caplan’s character is rendered immobile, she literally becomes dead weight trapping her sister in a situation she never wanted to be in.
Parallel to the sisters’ journey is a date between the owner of the house (John Stamos), an artist, and an obsessive fan (Caroline Ko). The fan is taken by the artist’s work that depicts Picasso-like portraits of women’s faces with flattened features. Not long into the date, however, the artist reveals the key to his method, drugging his fan and immobilizing her to be his next model.
Like Caplan, Ko becomes immobilized. Unlike the sisters, whose immobility is begrudgingly consensual, paralysis is inflicted upon her by the artist. As a result, there’s not much of an arc to explore between Ko and the artist; nothing to overcome. Ko is more a part of the environment, an obstacle for Caplan, than a participant in the action.
Drag is a silly, over-the-top gory comedy-thriller about two bickering sisters in over their heads. It’s also a movie about paralysis, rendering the main character physically immobile as an outward manifestation of the rut her life is in.
While DeVito drags Caplan through a booby-trapped house, Caplan drags DeVito through a booby-trapped life. Escape is only possible if they drop what’s weighing them down: DeVito’s character could get away if only she’d abandon her sister, Caplan’s character could fix her life by finally accepting help. Indeed, as Caplan becomes more open to putting her life back together, she also becomes more physically mobile, a fun reward by the filmmakers for choosing the “right path.”
Drag was seen during the 2026 Toronto After Dark Film Festival.
