Pretty Babies

For a debut film Pretty Babies by Tyler-Marie Evans demonstrates a certain sure-footed maturity as it follows two 18-year-old best friends Marie (Emily Alyn Lind) and Luna (Sadie Stanley) as they try with stars in their eyes to escape the confines of small-town tedium and hit the road for the lure of Los Angeles’s bright lights.

En route from Texas to California they dabble in sex work as a shadowy and potentially dangerous source of sustenance while taking obsessive refuge in the glamorous existences of such old Hollywood stars as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Viven Leigh, like aliens from another planet, in a succession of artfully chosen clips. Such escapes into a fantasy world helps to assuage the grim and murky reality of the situations they encounter.

The performances of Lind and Stanley capture the close intimacy of female friendship and support with an easy chemistry but Evans does not quite manage to get the balance right between revealing the truth of the girls’ predicaments, while lingering rather overexploitatively on their lightly clad physiques as well as rather clumsy displays of sexual violence as a plot device.

Evans knows how to shoot atmospherically and mainly at night with a succession of luridly coloured diners and motels which evoke the fantasy world her characters are determined to inhabit.

She adheres to the conventions of the road movie with overtones of Thelma And Louise and American Honey but at the same time manages to create her own individualistic sense of stye. There’s a change of gear when Luna follows a new-found romance to Las Vegas but there’s not much chance that the respite will prove enduring and the film seems to run out of road.

Evans navigates the familiar territory with confidence but the tonal shifts in the narrative frequently prove too abrupt to take the audience with them.

Reviewed on: 25 Aug 2026