Rating: 2.5/5
Hooptober 7.0 | 21/32 | disease-based 1/3
TW // Death, Murder, Blood, Vomit, Mental Illness, Disease
Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) sits with her father, Bud (David Pendleton). She wears a gas mask and gloves. She hugs her husband, Paul (Joel Edgerton). Their seventeen-year-old son, Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), helps move the father to a wheelbarrow. Paul and Travis wear masks and gloves as well. Outside, Travis apologizes before covering Bud’s face with a pillow and shooting him. They wrap up the body, put him in a hole, and set him on fire.
The family eats dinner in silence by the light of a lantern. Later, Travis goes off independently through the house while his parents argue. He enters his room, which has a print of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, which depicts a skeleton army killing en masse.
The camera abandons Travis and walks through the house, arriving at a red door locked inside. Unmasked, Travis walks into a room and sees a sweating man hunched over. It’s Bud. He rises and pukes blood.
Sarah wakes Travis up from his nightmare. There’s an intruder in the house (Christopher Abbott). What happens next will change everything for them.
By this point, the movie has made its entire plot clear.
Predictability isn’t an inherent flaw. Watching how it plays out is dull, but the ending is tense and gave me the ickies (compliment).
This would be a solid film to base conversations around media literacy.
I don’t love it, but it contains all the required beats for its story.
* SPOILER TALK* So, it’s pretty clear Travis is already sick before Will arrives. The dream recalls his exposure to Bud’s disease. So, from 15 minutes in until the climax, it’s a red herring game where they worry if Abbott’s character, Will, will be their downfall.
Travis’ surreal exploration of the house and sleep delulus is our second signifier that he is losing it. It is our way into the subjective experience of the illness.
Our third signifier is how often Travis is in the same position as Bud was when Travis found him sick.