Different types of stories require different types of pacing. If you’re telling the story of someone who gradually finds their normal life turned upside down, you probably want to go with a slow burn, gradually escalating the tension to a late-film reveal. On the other hand, if you’re telling the story of someone put into an impossible situation, in a fight for survival or a race against time, you’re going to want to keep things tense and fast-paced, to communicate a sense of urgency.
Pacing isn’t the biggest problem with Rattlesnake, but it’s definitely right up there. It’s a dull, interminable, and formulaic exercise, almost entirely devoid of tension or surprise.
The movie opens with a woman and her daughter driving down a long, lonely stretch of Texas highway. The woman is Katrina, and apparently she and her daughter Clara are “starting over,” though exactly what that entails is never made clear. They’re playing an alphabetical version of I Spy to pass the time while they drive. Katrina’s also really big on inspirational podcasts, real power of positive thinking-type stuff. She and Clara have a conversation about a boy at school who was bullying Clara’s friend. Clara says he deserved to get hurt. Katrina admonishes her, saying “nobody deserves to get hurt.” Even if you don’t know what’s coming, it’s a little on the nose.
And sure enough, their car blows a tire, and when Katrina pulls over to change it, Clara wanders off and gets bitten by the titular rattlesnake. They’re in the middle of nowhere, Katrina can’t get a phone signal, and her daughter is worsening fast. Katrina spies a trailer in the distance, and although it appears deserted at first, a woman emerges from the back and says she’ll take care of Clara. We don’t see what happens, but Clara’s symptoms subside and the woman directs Katrina to the nearest town, telling her “we’ll discuss payment later.” Once they make it to the hospital in tiny little Tulia, TX, doctors determine that she doesn’t have anything worse than heat stroke, and look at Katrina strangely when she insists she was bitten by a snake. And then a well-dressed man walks into the room after the doctor has left, telling Katrina that he’s here to discuss her payment. Katrina reaches for her insurance information.
“No,” the man says. “Your other payment.”
It’s very simple, the man says. In exchange for Clara’s life, Katrina must take the life of another person, and it must be done before sundown if she doesn’t want Clara’s healing to be undone. Clock’s ticking.
The premise is established early on, and the biggest problem with this is that little is done to develop the story beyond that. It’s pretty simple - Katrina needs to kill someone in this small town before the sun sets or her daughter will die. And there’s not much to it outside of that. So what this means is that Katrina looks for opportunities to take a life, but you know they’re doomed to fail, because at that point the movie will be over and at this point it’s only about fifteen or twenty minutes in.. For a story in which someone needs to die by sundown, there’s surprisingly little feeling of desperation or urgency. The stakes are literally life and death with a running countdown, but the pacing is sluggish, and Katrina never really registers more than what seems to be mild dismay at her situation, so there’s very little sense of momentum or tension. It all feels…leisurely, settling quickly into a rhythm of Katrina looking for an opportunity, then blowing that opportunity, then some mysterious apparition shows up and does something spooky to remind her of her obligation, rinse, repeat. I found myself saying “how much longer until this is over?” only to realize it was just the end of the first act. I’ve seen some formulaic horror films, but this one almost aggressively failed to hold my attention.
It’s not just the pacing either, there’s also an absence of real stakes as well. Katrina looks for an easy, justifiable victim, and the film front-loads her hard as someone who doesn’t believe in hurting other living things (apart from the “nobody deserves to get hurt” exchange at the beginning, there’s an animal-rights “Friends, Not Food” bumper sticker on the back of her car, and though they don’t tattoo KILLING IS BAD on her forehead, they might as well). This means the entire premise of the film is a setup to see what it takes to get her to sacrifice her values, and it’s pretty shallow in that respect too. Another source of tension should be the act of pushing Katrina to do something contrary to her core values. We should get a sense of what this is costing her, she should look tortured, desperate, sick with the idea of what she has to do, and she never really seems more than a little worried. There’s no real journey there either - she looks for the easiest, most justifiable targets possible, the film hands her a false start or two before settling on a cartoonishly bad person who totally deserves to die, so it never feels like a challenge or a real conflict. It never rises above the level of cliché, and although it didn’t end exactly how I expected it to, it feinted toward that ending before shifting to some seriously contrived bullshit that took almost all responsibility off of her shoulders, so she barely had to compromise her principles at all and got what she wanted.
Oh sure, the film tries to end on a spooky note, but it mostly lands flat because it’s not clear what the implications are. I’m certainly a big fan of not overexplaining, especially where the supernatural is concerned, but all of this feels a little out of nowhere. Apparently this town is plagued by mysterious random murders that are the result of people getting caught in this bargain but it’s not clear why or how, and the appearance of previous victims as messengers to Katrina would probably be a little spookier if you didn’t come to expect them like clockwork by the second act. So this might be one of those rare case where I’d like a little more than “oooh, a ghost healed her daughter and now she has to kill someone.”
I think maybe the best way to describe this film is as deeply mechanical. It’s shot and lit like a well-budgeted TV show, and the soundtrack smothers everything in a layer of ominous ambient sounds, pounding drums, shrieking strings, there’s nothing subtle about it - everything is punctuated with musical stings just in case you don’t know it’s scary. It’s one of the films where you can see all of the moving parts, where it feels about as inorganic as possible. Sure, there are some gorgeous shots of what appears to be central Texas, and the scene where Katrina learns the price of her daughter’s rescue is nicely creepy (because at that point it hasn’t been done over and over again), but that’s about it. Otherwise, you have a pretty good idea how the whole thing is going to play out, more or less, before the first act is over and at no point does it ever surprise. It’s a race against time that meanders, with a central conflict that doesn’t cost the protagonist a thing, and is so predictable that you don’t even really need to watch it to know how any given scene is going to play out. It doesn’t really play as a slow burn, because it never even rises to a smolder. It just sits there, inert and obvious, nothing new.
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