Being 90s erotica, there’s an undeniable queer subtext, too. I always worked for companies that wanted an exploitative movie, but when they’re asking me to do it, it’s going to be really deep and complicated” – Katt SheaĪs the pair become more entwined, Ivy begins to take up various roles in Sylvie’s life, from a sort of long-lost sister to a vaguely sinister surrogate mother, a development that happens to involve a kinky affair with Sylvie’s dad.
“They wanted Fatal Attraction with teenagers, and that is not what we gave them. “Her acceptance didn’t make me think less of her,” Sylvie says in voiceover early in the film. They talk of the inherent grossness of teenage boys, rebel via tattoos and piercings, and confess to each other their deepest resentments and sadnesses. Sylvie dubs her new friend Ivy after the tattoo she sports on her leg, while they pepper their conversations with white lies to make themselves seem cooler. Poison Ivy’s central protagonists, Barrymore’s immaculately-costumed unnamed loner and Sara Gilbert’s grouchy rich girl Sylvie, are thrown together in detention, and quickly bond over their shared isolation. I always worked for companies that wanted an exploitative movie, but when they’re asking me to do it, it’s going to be really deep and complicated.” “I don’t think New Line Cinema intended for it to be about a friendship between two girls, but we always knew that’s what it was,” Shea tells me from her home in Los Angeles. But her film also has far more things on its mind, unexpectedly conjuring one of the most convincing, queasily relatable adolescent friendships in 90s cinema.
It’s not unusual to see Poison Ivy spoken about in relation to various other early-90s erotic thrillers, films full of sexual dysfunction and fancy houses, where every cool marble surface seems built to show off the sweaty, softly-lit naked bodies of a Sharon Stone or one of the cheaper Baldwins.ĭirector Katt Shea, who also co-wrote the film with her then-husband Andy Ruben, stocks her movie with genre tropes, from its hilariously porny saxophone score to an almost chronic abundance of billowing white curtains. “She was lashing out because she was lonely and pissed that her life was like this. “She was fucking up families and being weird, but she really just wanted to be loved,” she said. Speaking to Rolling Stone earlier this month, SZA explained that it was Barrymore’s first major adult role, as a teenage outcast slowly infiltrating the family of her new best friend in the 1992 coming-of-age thriller Poison Ivy, that inspired the track, along with resonating with her own adolescence.
It’s a gorgeous, heartbreaking torch song, but one that leaves a major lingering question: what’s with that title?
I’m sorry I’m so clingy, I don’t mean to be a lot”. “I get so lonely, I forget what I’m worth. In SZA’s “Drew Barrymore”, the confessional alt-R&B chanteuse pines for an estranged lover while repeatedly second-guessing her own behaviour.