On October 24, the thriller «Don’t Move» starring Kelsey Asbill Chow and Finn Wittrock was released in cinemas. The official poster of the film attracts attention with the tempting inscription from producer Sam Raimi. In the review below, we will find out whether the presence of the poet in the team of creators contributed to the fact that the audience got a really exciting and intense story.
Pluses:
an interesting concept with good potential; there are tense moments; you empathize with the main character, and that's good;
Minuses:
the authors do not use all the available potential; the level of suspense is significantly reduced due to the prevalence of predictable situations typical of the genre; the character of the maniac raises certain questions;
«Don’t Move»
Genre thriller
Directors Adam Schindler, Brian Netto
Starring Kelsey Asbill Chow, Finn Wittrock, Daniel Francis, Moray Treadwell
Premiere movie theaters
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb
A young woman named Iris wakes up early in the morning, quickly gets ready, gets in her car and drives towards a high cliff with a picturesque view. But the heroine hasn’t come here to admire the dense forests or blue sky, because it turns out that it was on this very spot that her little son died in an accident.
The grieving mother is about to commit suicide herself, when a young and seemingly friendly man appears on the cliff and introduces himself as Richard. He realizes what is happening here, so he tries to support and comfort the suffering woman, and after a few minutes he leaves. And it works: Iris decides not to do what she had planned (at least, as she says, not today), but her trials do not end there.
Very soon, Richard shows his true maniacal nature, and to insure himself against unpleasant force majeure, he injects the unfortunate woman with a paralytic substance. Now she has only 20 minutes to escape because after this time, her body’s motor functions will completely fail. Iris is determined to grasp at this straw.
It is unlikely to come as a revelation to anyone that cinema has already produced a great many such stories. Plots about seemingly nice guys who turn out to be real monsters and chase scared girls with a knife in hand. They have been filmed as far back as Hitchcock in the 60s, although Craven in the noughties, even though conditional know-how a month and a half ago. So if we’re going to follow the simple «cat-and-mouse game» in 2024 trope, we need to add some kind of surprise, or at least a new element.
Hitchcock had a surprise. Craven has at least Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams in the frame. The conventional know-nothing has a non-linear narrative that turns everything upside down, which will also pass for a surprise.
The directors of «Don’t Move», Brian Netto and Adam Schindler, also decided not to limit themselves to a banal slasher with a simple game of catch-up and chose a variant with an additional element spied somewhere in the «Saw», namely — the protagonist has very limited time and opportunities. That is, for her, rescuing — is an asterisked task that potentially promised to make the story as old as time more interesting and suspenseful.
Unfortunately, the feeling of continuous tension barely arises during the movie.
The first half hour or so, before the long-suffering Iris turns into a vegetable, is still quite promising (the scene with ants shown in the trailer is just fine, I wish we had more of that). But because of her paralysis, there is no room for dynamics, so there is only room for suspense. However, even here the film has obvious problems because most of the situations in which the characters find themselves are standard and, accordingly, predictable. It will not be difficult for the audience to guess what will happen to the secondary characters or, for example, what the climax will be.
At the same time, the character of the villain himself is not very well developed: his motivation is left to the screenwriters, but for a novice killer, he is too cold-blooded. When the situation requires him to use a cold, emotionless mind, he succumbs to pity and acts in a way that is clearly not the best. Also strangler has something in common with M. Night Shyamalan’s «Trap», where Josh Hartnett played the psychopath.
Аt the beginning the concept of the paralyzed victim suggested relentless tension and looked quite interesting, but in the end it turned out not so much bad as just sterile.
But after such an extreme ordeal, Iris will definitely appreciate her life. What can I say, John Kramer gives a thumbs up.
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