Rating: 3.5/5
It starts with a locket in a rundown fire tower. Some friends wandering the woods find it, and one pockets it. Moments later, someone emerges from the ground — a once dormant killer, reawakened.
The film follows predominantly from the killer’s perspective as he seeks out the locket and murders the teens who may have it in trademark slasher creativity.
The film excels in the contradictions — the killer moving in the daytime, the brutal kills in the serene atmosphere, and the still camera observing the frenetic violence. A couple of the kills are so grotesque that I stifled shocked laughter. I might have let loose if the half-full theater didn’t sit there in dead silence.
Some shots remind me of Elephant, the first “slow” film I remember watching. There, the long tracking shots were mirrors — an innocuous hallway takes on a haunting quality with the change in who is walking through it. Here, it has no deeper meaning except to show how one-track minded the killer is. We see one exception, but I won’t spoil it.
Also, this is a horror film first, so the editors truncated the long tracking shots. The idea is to stretch out the tension to its most unbearable, not to test the audience’s patience. As another reviewer said, this is more grindhouse than arthouse.
Still, I heard some exasperated sighs near the end of the movie. The person to my left folded and unfolded their arms as the movie continued. I don’t know what they expected, but it wasn’t this.
Part of me wants to see that arthouse movie that doesn’t cut up the shots. But what we get makes effective use of that cinematic language, even if it isn’t towards anything more than a fresh way to shoot a slasher. It might be the most tense and unsettling slasher I’ve seen.