Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou
Cast: Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird, Otis Dhanji
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: Is it possible for a a movie review to become an impassioned plea? We’re about to find out.
Aside from an opening scene that anyone would be hard pressed to describe as anything other than surprising, we’re introduced to another crop of teenagers doomed for some degree of misfortune or carnage, which are not unlike any other crop of teenagers which enter a movie doomed to misfortune and carnage.
Maybe that’s the big reservation I have about the film. Coming from A24 and with every choice the filmmakers implement, I get the impression of someone wanting to produce elevated horror. But with a thin metaphor for drug use fueling the proceedings, and that aforementioned stock crop of teenagers, I wonder if the filmmakers themselves aren’t entirely sure they know what they want.
That’s not to say that there aren’t pleasures to be found in the film. Practical effects abound, and just when the film threatens to err on the wrong side of boring with its genre trappings, it times a jump scare pretty well. Not wanting to spoil the ending entirely, there’s also a depiction of death from the point of view of the dying that will probably stick with me long after anything else in the film dims in my memory.
All of the best parts in the movie, though, lead me to one inevitable conclusion. This is—for any faults I may have found with it—a lean 95 minutes of a movie. Mythology is dispensed at a minimum, and mythology is usually what will remove any effectiveness for a horror franchise. So, to go back to the beginning of this review, and I may already be too late for this request: Please, A24: don’t make a sequel. You’ve got a thing that mostly works here, and more of it will just explain how that blasted hand came to be. I really don’t care how that happened.