You're Next, 2011.
Directed byAdam Wingard.
Starring Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, AJ Bowen, Wendy Glenn, and Joe Swanberg.
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SYNOPSIS:
When the Davison family comes under attack during their wedding anniversary getaway, the gang of mysterious killers soon learns that one of victims harbors a secret talent for fighting back.
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Adam Wingard’s 2007 lo-fi Pop Skull was a surreal, unnerving acid horror venture into the disputable eyes of a pill addict bearing witness to the evil spirits residing either inside his home or his head. Made on a meagre budget and beholden to no lofty expectations - generic, financial or otherwise - it succeeded in modestly illustrating a hallucinogenic descent into delirium. Wingard’s latest horror You’re Next - arriving on our shores almost two years after its premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival – is a far more conventional affair that revisits and ravages the supposed sanctum of the family home. The film’s villains are far more human this time around, though no less impenetrable than ghostly spirits due to their senseless massacre of a random family, executed without motive or mercy.
It’s a familiar scenario; from the disturbingly playful naiveté of a bourgeois family’s murder in Claude Chabrol’s La Ceremonie, to the meticulous torture of a holidaying couple and their son in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (and its remake), cinemagoers have long learned never to complacently assume their holding is a haven from certain peril.
Abandoning any pretence of theme that justified the aforementioned films’ events, the Hollywood horror aesthetic of You’re Next utilises the cover of family to populate its halls with a veritable bevy of beige, interchangeable couples whom it subsequently dispenses with in the most bloodiest and creative ways imaginable. Leading the pack are manifest protagonists Crispian (AJ Bowen) and his girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson), whose car journey over to the family mansion reveals a morsel or two of unease within the nuclear unit. Some of the more interesting additions around the dinner table come in the form of horror director Ti West as an arty film student goaded into defending his highbrow tastes, and pugnacious, outspoken Drake (Joe Swanberg), who rarely passes up the urge to figuratively stick the knife into older brother Crispian. The mealtime bickering is moderately fun to watch, though it’s largely an intended ploy to throw the viewer off-guard from an underlying critical bone of contention.
Wingard makes use of tried and tested generic horror mannerisms engineered to have viewers jump at the wrong moments: loud, ominous noises outside the house, family members sneaking up on each other, establishing shots rendered obliquely sinister. During the initial attack, his camera approximates the frenzied movements of the cowering sons and daughters, ducking behind the table and shaking maniacally so as to accentuate the panic. The unruliness results in awkward, excessively shaky framing, acting at the expense of providing a fair sense of the mansion’s spacious interior.
The camera soon enough slows its movements just in time for the tone of the piece to begin its own erratic to-ing and fro-ing. When mother Aubrey (Barbara Crampton) cradles her dead daughter – throat newly slashed – and screams “My baby!” at the top of her lungs, one wonders if it’s acceptable to be enjoying such a grim exhibition of gratuitous death and mourning. However, Wingard later takes considerable pleasure in repeatedly pulling the rug out from under his audience, undressing various plot elements so that we may indulge a nervy laugh at the absurd reality of what has occurred. The comic relief is a welcome breath of respite, though it arrives much too late to compensate for the exhaustively dull procedural of mass murder.
The killing traverses a monotonous, interminable trail within the mansion’s confines, eventually reaching its zenith and tipping point whereby a pivotal character elects to tip the scales and exact equally horrific revenge on her masked assailants. The film suddenly whisks into reverse, seizing the viewer’s enjoyment of a family’s grisly demise and displacing it with the comeuppance of those with blood on their hands, now helplessly watching as their own blood flows freely from their open throats.
In this game of two halves, the audience is expected to – as is par for the course with most horrors - simultaneously cower with the family and side with their killers, only to then unexpectedly grant encouragement to the individual who ensures no bad bodies are left standing. What results is a disarray of identification; a strewn mess of guts belonging to anonymous corpses and a confused sense that something either hysterical or downright discomforting has transpired.
Flickering Myth Rating - Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Ed Doyle - Follow me on Twitter.
Directed byAdam Wingard.
Starring Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, AJ Bowen, Wendy Glenn, and Joe Swanberg.
SYNOPSIS:
When the Davison family comes under attack during their wedding anniversary getaway, the gang of mysterious killers soon learns that one of victims harbors a secret talent for fighting back.
Adam Wingard’s 2007 lo-fi Pop Skull was a surreal, unnerving acid horror venture into the disputable eyes of a pill addict bearing witness to the evil spirits residing either inside his home or his head. Made on a meagre budget and beholden to no lofty expectations - generic, financial or otherwise - it succeeded in modestly illustrating a hallucinogenic descent into delirium. Wingard’s latest horror You’re Next - arriving on our shores almost two years after its premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival – is a far more conventional affair that revisits and ravages the supposed sanctum of the family home. The film’s villains are far more human this time around, though no less impenetrable than ghostly spirits due to their senseless massacre of a random family, executed without motive or mercy.
It’s a familiar scenario; from the disturbingly playful naiveté of a bourgeois family’s murder in Claude Chabrol’s La Ceremonie, to the meticulous torture of a holidaying couple and their son in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (and its remake), cinemagoers have long learned never to complacently assume their holding is a haven from certain peril.
Abandoning any pretence of theme that justified the aforementioned films’ events, the Hollywood horror aesthetic of You’re Next utilises the cover of family to populate its halls with a veritable bevy of beige, interchangeable couples whom it subsequently dispenses with in the most bloodiest and creative ways imaginable. Leading the pack are manifest protagonists Crispian (AJ Bowen) and his girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson), whose car journey over to the family mansion reveals a morsel or two of unease within the nuclear unit. Some of the more interesting additions around the dinner table come in the form of horror director Ti West as an arty film student goaded into defending his highbrow tastes, and pugnacious, outspoken Drake (Joe Swanberg), who rarely passes up the urge to figuratively stick the knife into older brother Crispian. The mealtime bickering is moderately fun to watch, though it’s largely an intended ploy to throw the viewer off-guard from an underlying critical bone of contention.
Wingard makes use of tried and tested generic horror mannerisms engineered to have viewers jump at the wrong moments: loud, ominous noises outside the house, family members sneaking up on each other, establishing shots rendered obliquely sinister. During the initial attack, his camera approximates the frenzied movements of the cowering sons and daughters, ducking behind the table and shaking maniacally so as to accentuate the panic. The unruliness results in awkward, excessively shaky framing, acting at the expense of providing a fair sense of the mansion’s spacious interior.
The camera soon enough slows its movements just in time for the tone of the piece to begin its own erratic to-ing and fro-ing. When mother Aubrey (Barbara Crampton) cradles her dead daughter – throat newly slashed – and screams “My baby!” at the top of her lungs, one wonders if it’s acceptable to be enjoying such a grim exhibition of gratuitous death and mourning. However, Wingard later takes considerable pleasure in repeatedly pulling the rug out from under his audience, undressing various plot elements so that we may indulge a nervy laugh at the absurd reality of what has occurred. The comic relief is a welcome breath of respite, though it arrives much too late to compensate for the exhaustively dull procedural of mass murder.
The killing traverses a monotonous, interminable trail within the mansion’s confines, eventually reaching its zenith and tipping point whereby a pivotal character elects to tip the scales and exact equally horrific revenge on her masked assailants. The film suddenly whisks into reverse, seizing the viewer’s enjoyment of a family’s grisly demise and displacing it with the comeuppance of those with blood on their hands, now helplessly watching as their own blood flows freely from their open throats.
In this game of two halves, the audience is expected to – as is par for the course with most horrors - simultaneously cower with the family and side with their killers, only to then unexpectedly grant encouragement to the individual who ensures no bad bodies are left standing. What results is a disarray of identification; a strewn mess of guts belonging to anonymous corpses and a confused sense that something either hysterical or downright discomforting has transpired.
Flickering Myth Rating - Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Ed Doyle - Follow me on Twitter.