Buffaloed

Peg Dahl grew up in Buffalo and wants one thing: out. Selling counterfeit tickets to pay for college lands her in prison. When she gets out she discovers debt collection: an unpoliced business that raises money by frightening people on the phone. Peg soon starts her own firm. The subject is not fraud but the American entrepreneurial story itself. Peg finds a defensible reason at every step, and those reasons are exactly the sentences the industry uses to defend itself. The film plays it as comedy, but the details are real: debt files sold on from hand to hand, the same debt pursued by several firms at once, phone methods that run all the way to threats. The form is fast: talking to camera, quick cutting, high-tempo narration. The production uses Buffalo as subject rather than backdrop; the city is known as one of the places where the American debt collection industry is concentrated, and the film puts that fact at its centre. Tanya Wexler directs. Zoey Deutch plays Peg, Judy Greer her mother and Jermaine Fowler the prosecutor. Who it is for: viewers who like fast-paced con comedies. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the heroine to pay a price; the film keeps Peg likeable to the end and leaves the damage she does in the background.