Piercing is the story of mild-mannered husband and father Reed (Christopher Abbott), whose neat-and-tidy life with a loving wife (Laia Costa) and newborn infant is made messy by his gnawing desire to murder his child with an ice pick. When he realizes that’s just not doable, he goes for the next best option: hiring an escort so he can methodically kill her. Having determined a course of action, he sets about fastidiously arranging his ruse, replete with play-acting his forthcoming crime and precisely laying out his homicidal tools and finely folded clothes on his hotel bed. Yet when the time comes to deal with his chosen victim, call girl Jackie (Mia Wasikowska), his carefully-laid plans are thrown into hopeless disarray, leading to a romantic affair of decidedly unexpected deviance.
Adapted from Japanese author Ryū Murakami’s satiric novel, Piercing is a saga about sex and violence, as well as the surprising harmonies and dissonances underscoring relationships. Directed by The Eyes of My Mother’s Nicolas Pesce with a dreamy, stylized meticulousness that boasts more than a trace of his debut’s horror-ish flavor, it’s a work of symmetrical compositions, beautifully manicured sets, and striking wardrobe choices—radiating orderliness even when the proceedings take a left turn into bizarre black comedy. Nonetheless, when it came to Jackie, a wild card with short blonde bangs and a fabulously furry coat, Wasikowska admits that it was the material’s more chaotic elements which proved truly appealing.
“I think it was that everything [with Jackie] was externalized, and that she had these rambling monologues that weren’t particularly about anything to do with what was happening with the plot, or how she was feeling. She just yacked on about her slipper collection,” chuckles Wasikowska a few days before the film’s February 1 release in theaters and on VOD. “The idea to play someone who was a little bit more externalized and wacky and didn’t always make sense just seemed like fun to me.”
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While the acclaimed 29-year-old Australian actress is likely best known for her turns as the title character in Tim Burton’s 2010 blockbuster Alice in Wonderland and its less successful 2016 sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass, Wasikowska has a diverse filmography that speaks to her versatility—and varied artistic instincts. Piercing is a dark, twisted tale far more in line with prior efforts such as Park Chan-wook’s Stoker and Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak. Although rather than directly seeking out another project of psychosexual murder and mayhem, her attraction to her latest simply stemmed from a desire to embody a role that was far less internalized than her past few.
“This film had come off the back of playing a lot of period characters, and playing a lot of introverts who were really quiet and repressed,” she states. “I’d wanted for a while to do something more contemporary, and Jackie seemed so different and exciting to me, in the sense that she’s got this verbal diarrhea, and she just blabs on about everything. Everything’s outside for her. Nothing’s held back and not said.”
That freewheeling spirit extends, to a certain extent, to Wasikowska’s own method of charting her professional path. If not nearly as impetuous as Piercing’s Jackie, she confesses that she’s increasingly interested in following her heart, rather than any careerist plan.
“Sometimes there are things I haven’t done that would seem much more obvious, and vice versa,” she says. “I feel like I choose projects so randomly, and with no formula or reason for me doing half of them, other than that I recognize that, as I get older, I’m getting more selfish about wanting to do things I really enjoy. I want to do them for reasons that I want to do them. I don’t so much have a career strategy or anything. It’s just what seems fun, and who seem like interesting people, and whether it’s something I can get something out of it. There’s no rhyme or reason, really.”
Following intuition was also vital to getting inside Jackie, according to Wasikowka, considering that the character is anything but straightforward. “I think it helps that I only had twenty-four hours to think about whether I was going to do the role or not,” she remarks. “For sure it was daunting, but I think I feel that a lot anyway, and I don’t need to do anything more to increase it.”
Speaking about an early scene in which she repeatedly stabs herself in the leg with a pair of scissors, Wasikowska explains that her main goal was not to overthink things. “I sort of take the opposite approach, of trying to let go of trying to do anything in particular. The moment is always really powerful anyway, and that specific moment—although I’ve got half a prosthetic leg, and a guy sitting in the corner pumping blood out—is inevitably going to feel quite disturbing. So there’s nothing I try to pile on top of that. I trust in the moment, and it feels however it feels. I try to be a little bit more impulsive and instinctive rather than having planned anything, and that tends to work for me.”
The same holds true when it came to Jackie’s own backstory, which unlike in Murakami’s book, is never revealed in Pesce’s film. Wasikowska says leaving Jackie’s past shrouded in mystery was always the plan; to her, “I feel like Reed’s backstory kind of informs Jackie in its own way. I took that and rolled with it.” Moreover, she’s generally fine with not knowing—or inventing—detailed histories for the characters she plays, instead figuring that what she’s been given is enough to get her where she needs to go.
“Often, I feel like [creating backstories] is just a tool to make you feel like you’ve done something, and to make you feel a little bit more secure,” offers Wasikowska. “Because acting is such a vicarious thing— you’ve got nothing to show that you’ve done anything when you turn up on set, other than maybe a folder where you’ve shot some photos or written some things down. If that makes you feel better, then definitely do it. But I’ve started to let go of that a little bit because, if it’s there on the page and it’s strong in the script, then I like the instinctive feeling. I mean, everything changes so much. No matter how much you’ve prepared, or decided, when you’re there in the moment and you’re acting with another person, everything changes.”
Piercing is certainly not what one would call a “safe” endeavor to tackle, as Reed and Jackie’s evening together is brought about by the former’s covert desire to dispatch with the latter, thereby soothing his festering distress over traumatic memories of a young bunny-cradling girl and an older woman who met a grisly fate. Given the material’s intimately violent destination, it was important that Wasikowska and her co-star Abbott were a well-matched pair. “We didn’t have much time [to rehearse]; I think when I arrived in New York, they were already filming his stuff that I wasn’t in. So we really only had a couple of afternoons to read through some of the scenes. But we got along really well from the beginning, and had just heaps of fun with it actually, which is so good, because it’s the sort of role and characters that you want to be really comfortable with your costars with. And it was.”
There’s stark nastiness to be found throughout Pesce’s sophomore directorial outing, which paints a disturbing portrait of the bonds between brutality and affection. That isn’t to say, however, that the film isn’t also driven by a demented sense of humor, which mounts as the action becomes progressively more hostile. For Wasikowska, that was ultimately key. “I think that’s really important, to see the absurdity of it,” Wasikowska agrees. “I’m not sure everybody would see that in there. But when I read it, I saw a lot of humor in it. And I found it a relief.”
