Like anyone else, I have my biases, and though I know they shouldn’t color my opinions or perspectives or the choices I make, sometimes they do. Case in point: More often than not I will avoid anything directed or produced by the folks who gave us the Saw franchise, because even though I thought the first one had some stuff going for it and it didn’t really look like anything else at the time, everything that followed embodies for me the worst things about sequels and franchising in horror film. And over the course of multiple films (and multiple franchises), they’ve refined it into a slick, technically competent, profitable revenue stream. They don’t make films, really - they make product. And I’m not here for that.
So, full confession: I started to write up Death Of Me, which is directed by old Saw hand Darren Lynn Bousman, a month or two ago. But I started the film (which had a premise that at least piqued my interest), got as far as his credit on the title screen, and said “nope.” Shut it off, opted for something else instead.
But it sort of nagged at me. Am I being fair? Plenty of good directors have stinkers in their catalog, there’s no reason the reverse can’t be true as well. I was sort of curious about how the film would play out. And it’s important to look past our biases and snobberies once in awhile. Sometimes you want to give a filmmaker another chance, and well, what do you know, this is one of those times it…didn’t pay off. Sorry to say, it’s a muddled, cliched mess.
The film opens on a beautiful landscape in Thailand, overlaid with some ethereal singing, before landing on a couple passed out in the bedroom of their rental. It looks like they had a wild night, and the television behind them is droning on about a typhoon that’s about twelve hours away from making landfall. It’s gonna be a bad one, and the meteorologist is urging everyone to evacuate. The couple is Christine and Neil Oliver. Neil’s a travel writer, Christine is along for the ride, and that’s…pretty much all we get on that front. Indeed they did have a wild night the night before, and in trying to reconstruct it, they go to Neil’s phone and discover a bunch of photos and a long video. It seems like they got pretty wasted, and in the course of their bar crawl they ended up at a place way off the beaten path, and ended up drinking something that the video reveals was clearly spiked. So that’s not good. The waitress gives Christine some kind of amulet as a gift, and the next time the video cuts back in, they’re somewhere else entirely, barely able to walk. Christine slumps to the ground, and Neil, obviously in some kind of stupor, bends her over, undoes his pants, does what you think…
…before strangling her to death, snapping her neck, and burying her in a shallow ditch.
There are potentially a couple of different stories here - you’ve got the tourist couple off the beaten path, at the mercy of the locals and their strange customs, and then you’ve also got two people trying to figure out what happened during a 12-hour blackout. Sort of like The Hangover, only not played for laughs. Either one of these could have made for a solid movie on their own (though the former has been done plenty already), but instead what we get is something that starts out as the latter and ends up being the former, and so it’s sort of a mess. The video is sort of the instigating factor, but almost immediately it’s clear that there’s something not quite right going on in this little village, and that’s really where most of the movie happens. Which isn’t to say that the story is actually developed all that much. It turns pretty quickly into Christine and Neil alternately running around looking for each other, Christine hallucinating some creepy shit, and then waking up someplace else like a reset button has been hit on the scene. Neil looks vaguely confused and yells for Christine, Christine sees something nightmarish and passes out, lather, rinse, repeat. It doesn’t take long before it feels extremely predictable. That she’s experiencing hallucinations also gives the filmmakers a license to write off whatever set piece they want as a hallucination, whether it makes much narrative sense or not. It’s less a story and more a bunch of ideas for scary moments stitched together under the assumption that “this is really happening/oops, no it isn’t” will be enough to carry it.
What’s more, it’s another horror film that doesn’t trust that its audience is paying attention, so it has all of the restraint of a fire alarm. Every moment in the film is underlined with pulsing synths and spooky, ethereal singing and though it doesn’t really traffic in jump scares (thank heaven for small mercies), it goes right for music stings whenever the slightest thing happens, shouting at you “YOU SHOULD BE SCARED NOW.” It isn’t frightening - it’s irritating. It feels very much in construction like one of those horror films where they came up with a bunch of moments which are in and of themselves scary, but that exist in isolation from each other and from any larger narrative context, so instead of things emerging organically from the people and place and circumstances, we’re ushered from one nightmare bit to another with not a lot of regard for how it all ties together.
And the hell of is, there’s stuff going on underneath that makes me think that it didn’t have to be this way. The “small foreign village with mysterious traditions” angle, though nothing new (and maybe a little icky when it’s white folks in the middle of a poor part of Asia), is actually handled reasonably well for the first two acts or so. Since a decent chunk of the film is in unsubtitled Thai, it does develop a sense of isolation and paranoia as Neil and Christine run into obstacle after obstacle in trying to leave, and the villagers aren’t leering villains - quite the opposite, they’re very happy to see Christine wherever she goes, and it can be really unnerving at times. There’s a lot of little bits of business going on in the background (albeit almost drowned out by the constant reminders that Scary Things Are Happening) and even though none of the characters are really developed into people at all (Neil is essentially just vague confusion on legs), nobody chews the scenery that much either. There’s an expatriate with the stock overly-precocious daughter, but even that sort of pays off by the end. It doesn’t really need the weird video angle at all, and that’s certainly not where it’s doing most of the work, but if there’s a choice between developing an atmosphere or going for the cheap shock, it’s gonna go for the cheap shock every single time.
Ultimately a lot of what good there is ends up undone by the predictable rhythm of the film and a twist that I mostly had puzzled out by the end of the second act. This leads into a third act that goes on far, far too long - everything that’s been going on has to be explained to us by one of the characters, and this leads into about three fake-out endings before the film actually ends. There’s the big reveal, and instead of smashing to end credits while the revelation is still fresh, it drags it out, and then drags it out some more until by the end you’re just wanting it to stop already. There isn’t a single ounce of subtlety in this film from start to finish, and so what we end up with is less a story about two people in a dangerous situation with no immediate way out, and more a catalog of things that range from genuinely creepy to stock scares inflicted on a couple of nonentities. None of it is surprising, and everything works out pretty much the way you expect it to, since none of the multiple false endings are in and of themselves surprising or any kind of twist. The result is basically a whole bunch of scary parts thrown at you, mortared together by plot points that carry no surprise at all. It’s occasionally kind of gross, occasionally kind of creepy, but it’s mostly just an inert exercise in cliche and scenery. I gave it a shot, but I don’t think I’ll be making the same mistake twice.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon
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