This is going to be the first 10-ish Minute Review that should actually hit close to 10 minutes of writing time. Because this movie is terrible.
If you’re a fan of watching a gaggle of tweenage girls snipe and giggle at each other in overlapping (and mostly indiscernible) dialogue, try on clothes, and take pictures of each other then, by all means, pop this movie on.
If you’re like me, your eyes will start glazing over until minute 47 when stop the movie to do other things. Anything really. Eat an entire sleeve of Saltine crackers. Take up philately. Anything.
The setup is simple. A group of 12-year old super-rich girls gather for an overnight at a super-fancy modernist mansion filled with contemporary art. These are horrible children who spend their time bullying each other through their ever-present smartphones or, when convenient, to each other’s faces. We suppose, based on the genre and synopsis, that they will be terrorized or go all Children of the Corn or
Come something.
The first 20 minutes are promising–Timothy Hutton is good as a twitchy, easily distracted surgeon dad and the setting is intriguing–but then there’s a laughable, crammed-in exposition scene in which some nameless adult explains that the mansion may be haunted because of something-something-crazy-artist-murder-and-they-never-found-his-body.
And then we begin the interminably long scenes of tweenage girls doing what this movie assumes tweenage girls do: take selfies and be shitty to each other.
Full disclosure: I have no idea who tweenage girls do. Maybe this is what they do all the time. I hope not.
The point is that regardless of their accuracy depicting of the daily life of tweenage girls, these scenes are INCREDIBLY BORING. Worse yet is the decision to shoot them in a pseudo-artsy documentary style. Lots of jump cuts and weird angles of tweenage girls just… doing’ stuff. No movement on the plot, no character development. You just get to watch tweenage girls do stuff and be shitty to each other. It’s mind-numbing.
Maybe something interesting happens after minute 47. Maybe I missed out on some insightful social commentary or, at least, something entertaining.
Being boring is a cardinal sin for movies, especially genre movies, and for that sin I send #HORROR goes right to… well, not Hell exactly. Wherever halfway-watched movies go.
Movie purgatory? Whatever, I don’t care. My philately is calling.
Come for the nothing–don’t waste your time, stay for the “see previous”.
FADE OUT 