Reptile (2023): the Netflix police thriller where a realtor’s murder points back at the force

Grant Singer’s first feature puts Benicio del Toro on the trail of a small-town killing in Maine and lets the case drift, step by step, from a grieving boyfriend toward the people who sign the detective’s paychecks.

Reptile is a 2023 American crime thriller directed by Grant Singer, his first feature after more than a decade making music videos. Benicio del Toro plays Tom Nichols, a detective in a quiet corner of Maine who takes over the case of a young real estate agent found murdered inside a house she was showing. Justin Timberlake plays the victim’s boyfriend and Alicia Silverstone plays the detective’s wife. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2023, ran briefly in selected US cinemas from September 22 and arrived on Netflix worldwide on September 29.

On paper, the shape is one that crime fans will recognise within minutes: a seasoned investigator, a body in an empty house, a list of suspects that looks complete and is not. Reptile’s premise stretches that shape: instead of a single culprit waiting at the end of the corridor, the story widens from a domestic killing into the business of buying and selling land, and from there into the police department itself. It runs 136 minutes, long for the genre.

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The case: an empty house, a boyfriend and a man with a grudge

The discovery falls to Will Grady, the character played by Timberlake, who finds his girlfriend, Summer Elswick (Matilda Lutz), dead in a rural property the two realtors had been trying to sell. Tom Nichols and his partner, Dan Cleary (Ato Essandoh), question him first. Will tells them he wanted to marry Summer but could not, because she was still legally married to Sam Gifford (Karl Glusman). A nearby security camera has caught a dark car with a missing hubcap, and the question of what model it is becomes one of the small threads the detective keeps pulling.

The second suspect arrives from the Grady family’s past. According to Will, Eli Phillips, played by Michael Pitt, recently tried to force his way into the home of Will’s mother, Camille (Frances Fisher). Years earlier, when Will’s father ran the family real estate company, the Gradys forcibly acquired the Phillips farm, and Eli blames them for his father’s suicide. Questioned by the police, Eli turns the conversation around: he has been researching Tom, and he brings up a corruption scandal that touched the detective’s former partner back at a precinct in Philadelphia.

From there the plot keeps adding layers without resolving the first ones. A DNA result points one way, a search turns up drugs, and the department is ready to call the case closed long before Tom is. Without spoiling the final act, it is enough to say that the trail eventually leads to property deals, laundered money and colleagues much closer to the Nichols household than the detective would like. Eric Bogosian plays Captain Robert Allen, Tom’s superior and Judy’s uncle, Domenick Lombardozzi plays fellow detective Wally, and Mike Pniewski plays the police chief, Marty Graeber, so the cast list itself tells you how far into the institution the story is willing to go.

From music videos to a first feature

Grant Singer was born in 1985, studied film at Bennington College in Vermont and moved to New York in 2010. His break came in 2012 with the video for Sky Ferreira’s single Everything Is Embarrassing, followed in 2013 by IRL, a short film that also starred Ferreira; the two kept working together on several more of her videos. Ferreira returns the favour in Reptile with a small part as Renee, the victim’s best friend.

Over the next decade Singer became one of the most requested directors in pop. His credits include The Weeknd’s The Hills, Can’t Feel My Face and Starboy, Lorde’s Green Light and Perfect Places, Taylor Swift and Zayn’s I Don’t Wanna Live Forever, Troye Sivan’s My My My! and videos for Sam Smith, Camila Cabello and Ariana Grande. In 2020 he directed the documentary Shawn Mendes: In Wonder for Netflix. Reptile is his first time working at feature length with a script of his own.

Netflix announced the project on August 26, 2021, with del Toro and Timberlake attached from the start; the rest of the cast was confirmed that autumn. The story was written by Singer and Benjamin Brewer, and the screenplay is credited to Singer, Brewer and del Toro. Filming began in Atlanta, Georgia, on August 15, 2021, with the city and its surroundings standing in for rural Maine. The production company is Black Label Media, run by Molly Smith and the brothers Thad and Trent Luckinbill, the outfit behind Sicario, in which del Toro played the hitman Alejandro, and La La Land. Thad Luckinbill also turns up on screen in a small role.

Benicio del Toro as lead, producer and co-writer

For Benicio del Toro, born in Puerto Rico in 1967, Reptile is an unusual credit: he is not only the lead but a producer and a co-writer of the screenplay. His career already holds The Usual Suspects, the Oscar for best supporting actor for Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a second nomination for 21 Grams, the best actor prize at Cannes for Che and the role of Alejandro in Sicario. A brooding detective whose personal life is tangled up in his case sits squarely in the territory that has defined his work for three decades, and the writing credit suggests a part shaped around him rather than simply offered to him.

Justin Timberlake, who moved from pop stardom into acting with films such as Alpha Dog, Black Snake Moan, The Social Network and Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel, is cast here as Will Grady, the polished heir to a family property business, a role that asks the audience to keep weighing him as a grieving partner and as a suspect at the same time. Alicia Silverstone, still most associated with Clueless and her breakthrough in The Crush, and more recently seen in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, plays Judy Nichols, the detective’s wife and, through her uncle, the link between Tom’s home and his workplace.

The supporting cast is deep in character actors with crime pedigrees. Eric Bogosian is best known for Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio and later for Uncut Gems; Michael Pitt for Boardwalk Empire and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers; Frances Fisher for Unforgiven and Titanic; Domenick Lombardozzi for the detective Herc in The Wire. Owen Teague, Karl Glusman and Matilda Lutz complete a cast that leans on familiar faces from American crime drama.

Who shot and scored it

Behind the camera Singer worked with cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, whose credits include David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Jordan Peele’s Us and M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, Glass and Old, which places Reptile in the hands of someone with long experience in genre cinema built on unease. Kevin Hickman edited the film. The score was composed by Yair Elazar Glotman and features the Venezuelan producer Arca, an artist better known for her own albums and for her collaborations with Björk and Kanye West than for film work, which is an indication of the kind of sound the production was after.

Where it sits in the genre

The corrupt-department thriller has a long American lineage, from Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Prince of the City to James Mangold’s Cop Land, and in recent television it has moved into small towns with series such as Mare of Easttown. Reptile belongs to that family in obvious ways: a detective whose loyalties are tested by the institution he serves, a crime that exposes the economic arrangements of a community, and a domestic life that is not as secure as it looks. The open question for any new entry in that tradition is whether it brings enough of its own to justify the familiar framework, and that is the question Reptile has carried since its festival premiere.

Netflix’s own figures suggest the framework still travels. After its release, Reptile topped the platform’s weekly global ranking of English-language films for three consecutive weeks, with 19.9 million views in the week ending October 8, 2023, and another 14.2 million the following week. For a debut with a long running time and no franchise behind it, those are significant numbers.

A first feature that knows its models

Reptile reads, on everything documented about it, as a carefully assembled first feature: a director coming from short-form work choosing a classic genre, a star who helped write his own part, a cinematographer and composer chosen for atmosphere, and a story that keeps widening its circle of suspicion. Whether that adds up to something new or to a well-made variation on stories viewers already know will depend largely on how much patience they bring to a slow-burning procedural. Singer has since written his second film, Reenactment, again with del Toro, alongside Cameron Diaz and Ana de Armas, which began shooting in January 2026, and that may be where his voice as a feature director becomes clearer.

The Cast

Benicio del Toro

Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez, born on February 19, 1967, is an actor and film producer hailing from Puerto Rico. He has garnered numerous prestigious awards throughout his career, including the Academy Award, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award, and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award. Some of his notable roles include Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects, Javier Rodríguez in Traffic (which earned him an Oscar), Jack ‘Jackie Boy’ Rafferty in Sin City, Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Franky Four Fingers in Snatch, and Che Guevara in Che. Remarkably, he is the third Puerto Rican to have won an Academy Award. Read More

Justin Timberlake

Justin Randall Timberlake, born on January 31, 1981, is an American singer, songwriter, and actor. He has achieved great success in the music industry, selling over 88 million records. Timberlake has received numerous awards, including ten Grammy Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards, three Brit Awards, and nine Billboard Music Awards. He has also been honored with the Contemporary Icon Award by the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. According to Billboard, he is the most successful male solo artist in the history of the Mainstream Top 40. Read More

Alicia Silverstone

Alicia Silverstone, born on October 4, 1976, is an American actress. She began her acting career in the thriller film The Crush (1993), where she received the 1994 MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance. At the age of 17, she gained even more recognition as a teen idol after starring in Aerosmith’s music video for “Cryin'”. Silverstone’s stardom escalated when she portrayed Cher Horowitz in the popular teen comedy Clueless (1995), leading to a lucrative deal with Columbia Pictures. Later on, in 1997, she took on the role of Batgirl in the high-budget superhero film Batman & Robin. For her performance in the short-lived NBC series Miss Match (2003), Silverstone earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in the Television Series Musical or Comedy category. Throughout her career, she has remained active in film, television, and stage productions. In addition to her acting career, Silverstone is known for her vegan lifestyle. She actively supports PETA and has authored two cookbooks: The Kind Diet (2009) and The Kind Mama (2014). Read More

Eric Bogosian

Eric Bogosian, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, was raised in Woburn. He completed his high school education at Woburn Memorial High School in 1971. Bogosian then pursued higher education at the University of Chicago and later graduated from Oberlin College in 1976. Following his graduation, he relocated to New York City. In New York, he initially worked as an assistant at the Kitchen, where he also established a dance series. After five years, he decided to fully commit himself to his theater work, thus parting ways with the Kitchen. From 1976 to 1982, Bogosian was involved in the creation, direction, and/or performance of more than sixteen Off-Off-Broadway productions. Additionally, in 1982, he embarked on a tour of the Midwest alongside Fab Five Freddy and the Rock Steady Crew.

Tags: Netflix, thrillers, Michael Jackson, Alicia Silverstone, Justin Timberlake, Benicio del Toro

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