We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
FEAR THE NIGHT (2023)
In some circles, writer/director Neil LaBute tanked his reputation by making the goofball 2006 remake of The Wicker Man – which is a shame, because when he first arrived on the scene he was a best known for making emotionally devastating dramas and dark comedies like In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. His latest film is the home invasion thriller Fear the Night… and while it’s not on the level of his well-regarded dramas and dark comedies, it also doesn’t fall to the depths of the Wicker Man remake. (Which star Nicolas Cage insists was always meant to be a comedy as well.) So it may be best to refer to this one as “From the director of Lakeview Terrace”. It’s not great, it’s not bad. It is serviceable.
Maggie Q stars as combat veteran and recovering addict Tess, who isn’t known for enjoying social gatherings but agrees to attend a bachelorette party since one of her sisters, Rose (played by Highdee Kuan), is the bride-to-be. The venue is a location the characters in Bridesmaids would have shot down immediately: an isolated desert farmhouse. In addition to Rose and Tess, the partiers are Mia (Gia Crovatin), Esther (Kirstin Leigh), Noelle (Ito Aghayere), Divya (Roshni Shukla), Bridget (Brenda Meaney), and Tess and Rose’s extremely unpleasant and judgmental sister Beth (Kat Foster). They plan to spend their time at the farmhouse drinking, playing party games, and being entertained by Alfonse (KeiLyn Durrel Jones), a stripper who also handles the catering. But the party is ruined when a group of men armed with blades and bows and arrows shows up outside the house, demanding to be let in so they can retrieve something they believe is hidden away in there. And they’re very willing to murder everyone in the house to make sure they get what they came for.
There have been a lot of home invasion thrillers released in recent years, and Fear the Night doesn’t do a lot to stand out from the pack. It’s reminiscent of the likes of You’re Next and Tiger House – but that doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining to see Tess figure out ways to fight back against the violent attackers while also trying to help her sister and sister’s friends survive the night. If you’re looking for some thrills, the movie provides 92 minutes of solid entertainment. I tend to enjoy watching home invasion thrillers, because they take one of the scariest scenarios imaginable – the idea of violent strangers busting into your place in the night – and then let us watch people turn the tables on those who seek to do harm. They’re simple, often satisfying examples of set-up and pay-off, and I would consider Fear the Night to be one of the better ones.
That said, it would have been a lot better if LaBute had included more character work. Considering his past works, it’s a bit shocking that most of the characters in this film come off as such empty vessels. We don’t know anything about most of the people attending the bachelorette party. We’re never given any reason to like or care about most of them. Tess is the focus. We know Rose is nice and Beth isn’t – and some of the partiers seem to be just as mean as Beth, which isn’t surprising from LaBute. But for the most part, they’re just there to be scared and possibly end up on the body count. Some of them prove capable of stepping up and doing something to save themselves, some don’t, and some aren’t even given a chance. If we knew more about them, we could get even more wrapped up in their predicament. We could root for them or against them, and feel more suspense when they’re put in direct danger. All of the actors did well with the material they were given to work with, and each of the partiers has at least one moment in the spotlight as the story plays out, but the writer/director could have built up their characters more in the first half.
LaBute also kneecaps the suspense with the unnecessary inclusion of timestamps, as if it really matters to the viewer that something is occurring at a specific time of night. The momentum is hindered when the film stops to cut to a black screen with a time update between nearly every scene.
If you like home invasion thrillers, Fear the Night is worth checking out. Better decisions could have been made when the film was being put together, but it still works well enough as it is. Don’t let LaBute’s association with The Wicker Man keep you away.
MOTHER, MAY I? (2023)
Writer/director Laurence Vannicelli’s film Mother, May I? has been described as a psychological thriller, but any genre fans who turn to this one hoping for heart-pumping scenes of thrills and scares won’t get what they’re looking for. This isn’t really the sort of movie that will keep you on the edge of your seat. While there are certainly moments where characters display strange behavior that might creep you out, for the most part Mother, May I? might be better described as a “psycho-drama”… and playing out all this drama allows lead actors Holland Roden and Kyle Gallner to turn the film into a great showcase of their skills.
When I heard about this movie, Gallner was the main drawing point for me. He has been racking up genre credits for a couple decades now, including Red State, The Walking Dead, Scream (2022), and Smile, and I have been a fan since the early days of The Haunting in Connecticut and Jennifer’s Body. You can always count on Gallner to turn in a solid performance, even when the movie he’s in doesn’t work very well (the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, for example). Roden, I wasn’t familiar with. Although she has over thirty screen credits to her name, I haven’t seen any of them except an episode of Lost and an episode of Memphis Beat. I missed all 100 episodes of the Teen Wolf series she was in (and the recent movie). So this was my first time seeing her play a major role – and I was very impressed with what Roden does in this movie.
Gallner plays Emmett, a young man who tends to avoid his emotions, bottling them up and burying them deep inside. His mother abandoned him as a child and he has hasn’t heard from her since – but when she passes away, he learns that she has left her home to him. It’s the place he lived in as a kid, but he has repressed the memories of that time. He decides to sell the property, but first he and his fiancée Anya (Roden) go there to check it out, planning to stay there long enough to fix it up and get it on the market. The daughter of a psychoanalyst, Anya feels it is very important that Emmett explore his feelings about his mother while they’re in her home. She even tries to communicate with Emmett through something she calls “share reversal”, where they roleplay as each other to say things they think the other person isn’t properly expressing.
Then the roleplay goes too far. After taking psilocybin mushrooms, Anya starts talking, dressing, and acting like Emmett’s mother, even putting on her clothes and makeup and taking on her habit of smoking cigarettes. Her behavior can’t just be blamed on the ‘shrooms, because this goes on for days… and that makes up the bulk of Mother, May I?’s 99 minute running time. Both freaked out and angered by Anya’s behavior, Emmett has to try to figure out if Anya is just showing a disturbing dedication to her roleplaying or if she has somehow become possessed by his mother’s spirit. Whatever the case, it does cause him to confront the feelings he has about both his mother and Anya.
Gallner does a great job of playing the emotions of his troubled, baffled character, while Roden is given the opportunity to play two completely different characters. Anya and the “Emmett’s Mother” personality are both odd, but Roden is able to play them as two separate people. It’s clear when she’s in Anya mode and when she’s in Mother mode, and not just because one wears makeup and one doesn’t. They speak differently, they carry themselves differently. After watching this movie, I’m left eager to watch more of Roden’s work so I can see more of her range.
Mother, May I? will be too slow and strange for some viewers, and it will be disappointing for anyone who’s looking to watch an outright horror film, but it is an intriguing drama that’s carried on the shoulders of the terrific performances delivered by Gallner and Roden. It’s worth watching just to see the two of them at work
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