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Sharper is a con-artist thriller made in the tradition of House of Games (1987). Like that movie, it’s not so much about clever grifters who deceive for a living, á la Chameleon Street (1989) or Catch Me If You Can (2002); it too badly wants to immerse us in the intricacies of their deceptions to get unhandily wrapped up in character details. It seeks to place the viewer on a rung closer to the prey than the predator, though the end goal is to thrill rather than cheat us.

Sharper is sliced into short chapters; each unfurls from the perspective of one of its four shifty protagonists. The movie is Russian doll-, onion-esque. Because this is the kind of film that lives and dies by its twists, the less said about them now the better. I’ll offer that the movie starts with a young Manhattan bookshop owner (Justice Smith) with a massive inheritance getting fleeced of hundreds of thousands of dollars by someone he believed he was in love with. The rest of the film looks into the why and how, traversing time and social circles as it expands. Smith’s co-stars in the movie are Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, and Briana Middleton; they all play cons involved in the theft in some way whose deceit is suffused with different doses of expertise and morality.

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