CULTURE

Zoey Deutch Is a Deceptively Saccharine Teenage Nightmare in Flower

A new trailer for the upcoming dark comedy features Zoey Deutch as a smack talking vigilante who schemes her way to the bank.

by Brooke Marine

Jan. 10, 2018

A new trailer for the Zoey Deutch star vehicle Flower—an upcoming film about a group of rebels using their boredom and wily adolescent ways for vigilante justice and extortion—is here, and it does not disappoint.

In the film Deutch plaus Erica, a smack-talking high school-aged scammer whose future step-brother moves in with her and her mom (played by Kathryn Hahn) in Los Angeles. Dylan Gelula and Maya Ehset star as Erica’s sidekicks Kala and Claudine, scheming and scamming their way to the bank when they expose a high school teacher Will (played by Adam Scott) for engaging in sexual misconduct with underage students. Using a grocery store meet cute and Erica’s “daddy issues” as an opportunity to shake down Will, the trio of teenage avengers find exposing the accused teacher their “moral obligation,” but of course not everything goes according to plan.

In 2012, the original screenplay for Flower (then written by Alex McAuley) made waves on the famed Black List of orphaned films that are cast aside without a production company behind them, and was reportedly one of the most well liked of the bunch. The new version of the dark comedy comes from the minds of Max Winkler (screenwriting son of the Fonz) and Matt Spicer, who recently made waves last year with his twisted social media satire Ingrid Goes West, so it’s no doubt that the film will take its lead characters to some colorfully dark places, while making viewers laugh pretty hard along the way.

Flower made its first premiere last April at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, but now the film—which took just 17 days to complete and became the first Tribeca film to be purchased by a major studio—will be released by The Orchard films in March. Deutch’s year is about to be extremely busy—in addition to Flower, she’s landed a starring role in the upcoming Netflix romantic comedy Set It Up and a part in the tearjerker Richard Says Goodbye.