Director: John Logan
Cast: Theo Germaine, Carrie Preston, Anna Chlumsky, Kevin Bacon
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new!
Did I Like It: Nearly each—perhaps even every—moment of the film feels forced, mannered, and stiff. It’s truly a wonder that a directorial debut from an Oscar winning screenwriter would be forged of this much leaden dialogue. It’s an after school special at its core, even if it has its heart in the right place.
That doesn’t even begin to cover the perfectly obvious way in which the story unfolds. Movies like the recent <Scream (2022)> embrace the inclusivity of the moment, but also manage to make me invested and guessing about the mystery behind the violence on display. Here, I figured out the entirety of the plot by halfway through the runtime, and I think you will, too. It’s plot is on the complexity level of a police procedural, and not a very good one, at that.
The film also feels like a false bill of goods. Advertising points to the movie being a slasher flick wherein the horror of a gay conversion camp is what ought to be truly scary. It’s only kind of about that, and only in the last few fleeting moments of the film.
In short, I didn’t care for it.
And that’s okay!
Ungainly, mostly frustrating slasher movies fueled by heteronormativity are legion. It’s sort of encouraging that a film fueled by an honest attempt at inclusivity isn’t very good. It doesn’t need to be. I might be talking out of my depth here—but then again, more people may need to say it—but a bad movie will add to the normalizing of the LGBTQA experience. If this movie fails, it doesn’t mean that inclusivity—especially in horror—will wither on the vine and die.
Unless that’s where the discourse about the film leads. That would be the worst part about the whole enterprise, but it also would not be the film’s fault. It would be ours.