Another one of horror film’s time-honored traditions is stories of make-believe that goes too far. Maybe it’s a movie, or some kind of game, or more recently a reality show or an escape room, but what they have in common is the idea that something that’s being presented as simulated danger turns out to be real, actual danger. It’s an idea that’s easy to do badly, as films like The Task, Hellraiser 8, or The Houses October Built readily demonstrate. It’s a pretty simple premise - what if they’re being murdered for real? - and it’s often treated simplistically, starting and ending with the obvious. It’s the kind of film I’m likely to skip over, all other things being equal.
But as an example of this kind of story. Extremity avoids a lot of the cliches I was afraid it was going to fall into, and largely tells a story that finds tension in places other than the obvious and keeps you guessing. At least, until the third act, when one seriously wrongheaded narrative choice undoes a lot of the film’s goodwill and it limps to its end as something much less compelling. I’m not mad, just disappointed.
After a brief, cryptic scene of someone we can’t see possibly engaging in self-harm, the film opens with sensationalistic title cards and voiceovers about extreme haunt attractions, and how they’re totally unregulated with no safe words or supervision and how anything could happen in one, interspersed with ostensible footage from such haunts, with people being slapped around, covered in cockroaches, etc. You get the impression that this is going to be a movie about how some unsuspecting patrons are lured into some kind of snuff operation, and that threatens to be really boring.
But then the camera pulls back to reveal that what we’re seeing is a video that a young woman is watching on her phone. Her name is Allison Bell, and she’s applied (and selected) to be a participant in an extreme haunt (sometimes called “immersive horror experiences”) called Perdition. She receives instructions to drive to a building out in the middle of nowhere. Then she’s on the phone with someone else, presumably her girlfriend, who’s begging her not to go through with this. Allison assures her she knows what she’s doing, that this is something that she needs to do. Allison had some very bad things happen to her as a child, things maybe she’s never really gotten over. There have been suicide attempts. She’s obsessed with horror films - not your standard stuff, not like what I write about here, the real grimy underground stuff. The kind that sometimes gets confiscated by customs. She arrives at her destination, gets out of the car and dumps her medication out.
Allison wants to push herself as far as she can.
This is the gist of this kind of experience: Once you’ve committed to it, once you’ve signed the release, you’re theirs. And it becomes clear very quickly that what Allison and Zachary imagine that is going to mean is very different from what the people running Perdition have in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride. It’s too late to get off now. The narrative, then, features a lot of interplay between what’s artifice and what’s real. Part of it is in how the story is told from multiple perspectives. The film bounces around between what’s happening in the present, flashbacks to Allison’s childhood, conversations with her therapist and a fraught life with her partner, along with the occasional dream sequence, and the perspective of a Japanese news crew there to document Perdition. So there’s what Allison and Zachary are enduring, what brought Allison here in the first place, and what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s a lot of perspective-juggling going on, but it’s all easy to follow. Anyone coming into this expecting a story about an extreme haunt where the make-believe is ALL TOO REAL or some shit like that is going to be disappointed. For most of its running time, this is more about the tension created when someone who is most likely very unstable puts themselves in a position where their already-fragile ability to cope is pushed to its limits, as well as what happens when you’re trying really hard to make your artistic endeavor a success and maybe you’re taking some chances you shouldn’t, or cutting some corners. It’s more of an accident-waiting-to-happen film, and that’s where a lot of the tension is.
And in that regard, it does a good job of keeping us on our toes - at any given time, it isn’t clear how much of what’s happening is really this attraction going off the rails and how much of it is theater, or to what degree Allison is decompensating or not. Just when you think you’ve gotten it figured out one way or another, it’ll throw something else in to wrong-foot you. There was one twist that I guessed pretty early on, but to the film’s credit, it took a long time to pay it off, which made it easier to believe that maybe it wasn’t coming after all. As the film moves on, we start to get a sense that everyone’s sort of got their own issues - Allison’s are obvious, but the person running Perdition is dealing with a lot behind the scenes, you get the sense that his motivations might not be the healthiest (though not in the way you’re probably thinking), leading to him breaking with protocol and overstepping boundaries, and his staff run the gamut from competent professionals to relatively untested amateurs, to people who seem quite possibly legitimately unhinged. So it’s a story where we’re getting a glimpse into all of the places where this could all fall apart, a confluence of the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time leading to avoidable tragedy. But it’s never (well, almost never) as simple as unsuspecting teens being lured to their doom.
Also to its credit, it has a great sense of setting and style - exteriors are snowy and rural, forests and the outskirts of town in what might be the Rust Belt, though it’s never made clear, interiors are suitably dank and decaying urban ruins, all lit in lurid funhouse reds and blues and purples, as befits the nature of Perdition. It’s one of the few times the abandoned hospital aesthetic doesn’t seem like a cliché to me precisely because Perdition is leaning into that aesthetic like any horror attraction would, and it looks quite real. There’s sort of a late 70s/early 80s grindhouse scuzz to it in places without it ever feeling like pastiche. The soundtrack is ominous synthesizer, shrieking strings, discordant rattles and clanks and thumps, and though it’s nothing surprising, it conveys a feeling of jittery anxiety well, and never really overwhelms the action. The acting is serviceable to good, but the dialogue - especially the sequences with Allison’s therapist - runs toward the clumsy and affected, and it’s definitely distracting at times. There are, on the other hand, some deft cinematic touches in the visual storytelling, so the overarching proposition is still one of a film that’s smarter than you’d expect from the premise.
The biggest problem to me is probably the third act, which starts strong, but then climaxes in a twist that absolutely beggars believability and leads to a series of events and narrative choices that push everything into much more disappointingly conventional territory. A lot happens very quickly and sort of glosses over how plausible any of it would be, some characters behave in really puzzling ways, and it takes the otherwise relatable, grounded story that we’ve been watching so far and pushes it into Grand Guignol in a way that to me didn’t really feel earned. There’s also one final flashback that feels like it’s supposed to be an important revelation, but it’s not really set up as well as it should be so it just feels a little confusing and out of nowhere, ending on a note as cliched as you might have expected before you started watching it. Which is too bad, because there was definitely something here that was working well for most of its running time, and it’s by the same director who made Last Shift, another film that seemed like it was going to be hackneyed mediocrity and ended up being much better than that. But that film, although not perfect, came nowhere close to sabotaging itself in the home stretch like this one did. You don’t get what you were expecting, and that’s good, until it isn’t.
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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