Have you ever felt like somebody’s watching you, 3.5 readers?
You know what no one is watching? This blog!
Open your peepers and start watching this review.
I’d never seen a trailer or any hype for this film. I don’t usually do horror. But I wanted to go out last night and wasn’t interested in Inside Out 2, so I checked this out. I’m glad I did.
Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, a troubled young woman who has fled to Ireland to escape a sordid past. With her trusty pet parrot in tow, she accidentally goes on the road trip to hell when her car breaks down in the middle of a scary forest. Alas, she soon discovers that no one has ever escaped this forest on foot before sundown alive in many years.
After being chased by scary, hard-to-see creatures, she finds a group of people in the same predicament. They too were once lost travelers, stranded by chance in the forest, but now they can’t leave. They lead Mina to a bunker with a 2-way mirror and inform of various rules that have kept them alive for years, namely that they have to remain in the bunker at night and they must stand in front of the mirror so the watchers can watch them.
Mina can’t believe this BS is her life now and dreams up various escape attempts, various ways to try to defeat and escape the watchers and I’ll leave it there. It’s up to you to watch the movie and discover the secret of who the watchers are and why they are watching.
I’ll tell you what made me feel old is this film is the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of famed directory of scary horror movies with twist endings, M. Night Shyamalan. She was probably just born at the height of her father’s fame with these crazy twist movies and now she’s directing on her own. Where does the time go?
I will hand it to her in that she doesn’t go heavy handed with the ending like her old man did. I always felt like M Night got so much praise for the surprise twist at the end of The Sixth Sense that he never stopped trying to recreate it in every other movie he made whereas he probably should have just accepted that twist was a one in a million and just focused on making good movies.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy.
Bookshelf Battle 