Read @ Joe’s

Title: Little Miss Sociopath (2025) Director: Miv Evans Writer: Miv Evans Studio: Access 2 Productions IMDb Plot: A crazy look at a world we’ll all be in some day. Joe Says: Little Miss Sociopath is a dark comedy about making bad choices for the right reasons. The heavy themes of life, love, and career are carefully hidden in a silly, fast-paced plot with likable characters tossed into preposterous situations.

Little Miss Sociopath is a dark comedy about making bad choices for the right reasons. Or, to totally jive with the promo materials, to make the best stories. The heavy themes of life, love, and career are carefully hidden in a silly, fast-paced plot with likable characters tossed into preposterous situations like vinaigrette and croutons. Although the “best stories” nomenclature may be superlative hype, Little Miss Sociopath is interestingly entertaining. 

Like careening through life itself, the movie takes a while to get its proper footing. Written and directed by Miv Evans, the story moves from a family drama involving elderly caretaking, then becomes a goofy heist caper at a neighborhood pharmacy, before finally settling into its get-rich-scheme-by-committing-fraud motif. Fortunately, Little Miss Sociopath stars Jenny Tran and Brendan Coughlin, two attractive and charming actors whose internal psychosis amps the narrative comedy into the absurd. 

Tran plays Clementine, a wallflower of a young woman who is externally silent but a raging fountain of rashness internally (with a brutally fun monologue voiced by Jade Williams). She hooks up with Adam (Coughlin) whose perpetual lying is only outshadowed by his heart as an aide-de-camp with benefits. Following the (not so) questionable death of her toxic step-mother, Clem decides to get into the caretaking business in order to swindle a group of seniors out of their previously-consigned riches. But these seniors, led by the madcap Erica (Pamela Shaw), are not necessarily pushovers. Some of them are also rather healthy. Hilarity drips like morphine.

Evans’ script modulates between standard sitcom fare and goofball glee. The comedy builds with the pressure but until that heat finally flares up, most of the set up is mere steam. Evans’ directing style follows that general sitcom feel with a general flatness. Luckily, she keeps the cast in the spotlight. And they shine.

Evans, however, does perform greatly in displaying Clem’s schizophrenia. Not only by placing her outward appearance in direct conflict with her internal fire, but also in the concluding handling of her step-mother. Evans has Clem going from zero to warp eight in the heartbeat between “I love you” and “I need to kill you.” And Tran pulls it off, too. That character trait (flaw?) makes Clem’s path into outright criminality an understandable path. And, fortunately for the viewer, an enjoyable one, too.

Little Miss Sociopath works as an indie comedy by mixing light-hearted tones with an open rawness. The on-location shooting grounds the absurdity with a sense of familiar realism. And the juxtaposition between the naivete of young and the callousness of old is more The Cincinnati Kid gamesmanship than intergenerational misunderstanding. Yet the rambling plot is unfocused at times, which might be detrimental in its legacy, particularly with an established audience that was young when The Cincinnati Kid was part of the pop culture zeitgeist. That, and maybe Clem and Adam are simply too nice to be sociopaths, especially as they run to a happy ending. 

Little Miss Sociopath laughs its way to a proper happy ending, even when the sprint slows down to a trot.