I know I talk about it a lot, but boy, is pacing ever important in movies, especially scary movies. There are all kinds of ways to handle it, but knowing when to let off the gas and when to floor it is critical in terms of building up tension and mood. Sure, you can go full-tilt from the start, but that runs the risk of numbing the audience. The quiet moments make the loud ones stand out. An expertly paced horror movie plays the feelings of its audience like an instrument, and pacing has a lot to do with that.
It’s the biggest problem with What Keeps You Alive as well. I mean, it’s also a clumsy, obvious melodrama in a lot of ways, but it’s the pacing that kills it. More specifically, how certain choices mean that the filmmakers have to fill a lot of time that they wouldn’t have if they’d built the story up more naturally, and the results end up blowing past scary and landing somewhere in the realm of the ridiculous.
This is the story of Jackie and Julie. They’re celebrating their first anniversary as a married couple by going up to a big lake house that Jackie’s family owns. It’s a huge, sprawling, rustic place overlooking a gorgeous piece of Canadian wilderness. They’re there for an idyllic weekend, but almost immediately, things seem just a little bit off. Jackie keeps sort of staring out at the lake, and she’s sort of evasive about how long it’s been since she’s been up here. And then, their first night there, a car pulls up to the lake house. It’s a young woman named Sarah, who lives on the other side of the lake and was surprised to see the lights on. She says it’s been awhile since anyone’s been up here…
…and then she calls Jackie “Megan.”
It’s not difficult to figure out what the basic hook is going to be: Jackie has been keeping secrets from Julie, and we expect that over the course of the film the deception will slowly unravel, as Julie discovers more and more about Jackie’s past, and what happened up here at the lake, all those years ago. That’s a time-honored story, and a slow build of unease leading to some horrible revelation could be really scary. I mean, in some ways that’s the basic story of
Honeymoon, which builds to a chilling conclusion based on gradually increasing dread. There are a few ways you could subvert it as well - you could lead the audience to believe it’s one type of secret when it’s actually another, you could lead the audience to believe one person’s hiding something really bad when it’s actually another, you could even lead the audience to think that there’s something wrong with one of them when actually two people are in cahoots. It doesn’t even need to be an especially complicated story, since the real work is in finding out what happened and how bad it really gets. In finding out who this person you thought you knew really is.
What this film chooses to do instead is forsake the slow, ominous buildup (apart from a few bits here and there) and just drop the other shoe at the end of the first act. That’s audacious, I’ll give it that - I wasn’t especially impressed with the film at the opening, but I didn’t see that coming, and it did give me pause. I didn’t expect it, and I like it when a film does the unexpected, at least on principle. The problem, then, is what it does with all of the time remaining in the film.
By revealing the twist early, the filmmakers defy convention to a degree, but it leaves them with the problem of how to make the other hour or so interesting. As it turns out, they just aren’t up to the task. Now, instead of a gradually escalating sense of unease and paranoia leading up to a shocking revelation, we get a sudden, shocking revelation (that still feels a little underbaked - we’ve just gotten to know these people and now this is happening) followed by a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse that grows increasingly ludicrous the longer it continues, making everything feel less and less believable and more and more padded for the sake of the running time.
Part of this is down to characterization. There are a lot of ways you can play someone whose dark secret has been revealed, and the longer they’re onscreen with the protagonists, the more and more the antagonist becomes a cackling villain from a Lifetime Network movie about how the person I loved wasn’t who I thought they were. There’s monologuing (so much monologuing) and even a point where the antagonist shines a flashlight under her face, I guess for the benefit of the audience? It just seems silly. And as the antagonist monologues and makes choices that make no sense outside of the need to fill time, the protagonists engage in tearful rounds of “why are you doing this?” instead of fighting for their lives. Nobody behaves in ways that make actual human sense after the first thirty minutes, and it’s obvious that that’s because if they did, the film would be less than an hour long.
It’s hard to overlook bad pacing, but no film is perfect, and generally flaws in one area can be compensated for by strengths in another. Do other things really well, and the things you do badly can be overlooked. But again, there’s not a lot here to distract us. The writing tends toward the wooden throughout - there aren’t a lot of exposition dumps for a (nice) change, but the dialogue still doesn’t sound like how people actually talk to each other, putting it at odds with the largely naturalistic setting, a problem exacerbated by how much of it there ends up being as the movie goes on. Like, the longer everyone talks, the less natural any of it sounds. The score’s a little too intrusive too - there’s no reason for almost every scene to be punctuated by minor-key piano or ominous synthesizer swells, it doesn’t add anything in terms of mood and is even a little distracting at points. There’s no reason for a jeep ride through the country before anything bad has happened to sound scary. That’s a technique that can be used to good effect when employed sparingly to create a sense of unease, but here it’s just like the soundtrack got stuck on “creepy” and nobody could figure out how to shut it off. It’s a good-looking movie, I’ll give it that, leaning heavily into gorgeous shots of the Canadian wilderness and not getting overly fussy, and whatever else is wrong with this film, there are some interesting editorial and directorial choices scattered throughout - uses of light and sudden cuts to suggest disorientation, some nice shot juxtapositions toward the end, it’s just too bad that it’s all in service of a story that beggars belief.
If the filmmakers had made, say, the first half of the film a character study with little details that seem off scattered throughout, just enough to pique our attention without being too ham-handed, and then hit us with the reveal and escalated tension from there, there might have been something to this. As it is, it peaks far too early, runs out of steam way too quickly, and limps to its ending. Pretty much every cliché gets tagged along the way, and even after what feels like an eternity of increasingly contrived dilemmas leading up to a pretty stock ending…there’s still half an hour left. That means that things go from the contrived to the ridiculous, and after an hour or so of characters being underdeveloped and improbable twists and false endings, even more exposition has to be crammed in in the form of flashbacks to make the ending they DO come up with make any sense at all, except for yet another last-minute twist so unbelievable as to be almost comical. Of all of the reactions the filmmakers were aiming for, I don’t think any of them were me throwing my arms up and yelling “REALLY?” in the privacy of my own home.
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