Watched this in our annual Halloween horror-movie roundup (it’s on Netflix), and I’m frankly kind of mystified about why people liked this.
Admittedly, I’m not super sophisticated about appraising acting quality, so I could be missing something in the performances there, but i felt from a movie-construction perspective, it just didn’t hold together.
So, I guess that the prime tension that’s supposed to be pleasurable is the question of “is there actually anything weird going on in the house”. But that doesn’t feel like a compelling question because the film lays the horror vibe down really thick from the first minute. And once that train gets rolling, everything plays out in kind of the most predictable way possible.
This did seem to be a uniquely LA-y movie, so maybe it speaks to people who live in the valley in a way that it just misses otherwise. But I wasn’t feeling it.
Some more spoilery thoughts.
I feel like any other ending would have been better:
- there’s no explicit horror element. The dinner party just ends and everybody goes home. The film is just a portrait of grief and anxiety and existential horror.
- there is a horror element, but it isn’t just normal weird cult stuff, it’s because there’s a real shoggoth in the garage, but nobody seems to be talking about it.
- the protagonist watches the video, decides it the best way to resolve his own grief, and joins in the shenanigans at the end.
Dont even get me started on the mechanics of the murder plan, because, like, who poisons the dessert wine? What kind of philistine chugs a sauternes? If you’re going to murder everybody anyways, why make the first half of the dinner party so fucking weird? Make it actually fun and just poison the Jaeger shots 2 hours in. Also, bring more than one gun.
Considering how much time we…spent in the first half of the film, I barely had a sense for any of the characters, and I particularly didn’t feel like I had a good grasp on what the cult was even trying to do. I guess that maybe freeing others of their pain is a mitzvah (e.g. the coyote), and that’s how you get to super heaven? But what about the people you killed? Kind of a dick move, if they’re your friends, to kill rather than convert them.
I also didn’t like the coyote/big dude murder parallelism, because I don’t think it meant anything. They weren’t the same situation, the girlfriend didn’t develop as a character to get from A to B, it was just a visual callback with nothing supporting it.
I really like the idea of a horror movie that uses social anxiety as it’s horror kicking off point…but this didn’t really do that.
Maybe it’s unfair to compare to some of the recent genre standouts, but I loved the slow burn tension in House Of The Devil, and felt that, e.g. the beginning of You’re Next did a better job of capturing the horror of social obligations. I feel like I was on board with the concept of the film, but just didn’t feel that it executed it well.