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The film’s look has a slightly retro quality, but it’s the score and sound design that truly unsettle, filling the feature’s spaces with creaks, plunks, and metallic scraping. It’s not quite The Greasy Strangler (2016) in terms of sheer grotesque weirdness, but it’s adjacent, and a hell of a lot scarier. However, his bizarre stylistic stamp gives the story a harrowing unpredictability even when it’s obvious that the destination involves murder, cannibalism, and freaky perversions of Middle American domesticity.
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Devereux Milburn’s Honeydew freely borrows elements from several notable influences – among them, Motel Hell, House of 1,000 Corpses, and Garth Ennis’ Preacher comics. The raw ingredients are familiar: While traveling through a remote rural area, a young couple’s car breaks down, stranding them at an isolated farmhouse inhabited by menacing weirdos. (Which look more like goth-metal music videos than real dreams, but no matter.) Eventually, however, Burns starts to lose the thread, and disastrously so: romanticizing a creepy, age-inappropriate relationship muddying the stakes when he should be clarifying them and abruptly ending the film with a jaw-droppingly bad left-field twist. Giving a chilly, retro Cronenbergian sheen to a premise that crosses Stephen King with Until the End of the World (1991), writer-director Anthony Scott Burns gets big points for style, especially in his film’s mesmerizing nightmare sequences. Unfortunately, the scientists running the experiment are not engaged in mundane medical research, but rather searching for a dark figure lurking in the universal subconscious. Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) is a teenage runaway who joins a sleep study, partly to have a place to lay her head at night, but also to perhaps alleviate her disturbing nightmares. It’s difficult to envision another 2021 horror film squandering its early promise as thoroughly as Come True. Now available to rent from major online platforms. The feature is a solid implementation of a familiar premise, but it is too enamored with fruitlessly drawing out its mysteries and too disinterested in cultivating thematic depth. Unfortunately, the film suffers from a dearth of surprises, except for its final, silly twist. Son is a stylish feature with a sadistic flair for building tension in its set pieces to an appropriately demonic pitch. When a horrifying means of abating the boy’s ailment is revealed, Laura is obliged to take increasingly drastic actions to protect her only child. David is suddenly struck by a mysterious, debilitating illness that seems to be connected to the abusive sect that his mother escaped long ago. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the genre will quickly sort out what’s going on with David (Luke David Blumm), the tween son of single mom and cult refugee Laura ( Halloween’s Andi Matichak). Ivan Kavanagh’s occult-horror chiller Son packs lots of incident and gore into its 98 minutes, but not much originality. It’s less concerned with lucid metaphorical readings than with conjuring the absurd, exhausting sensation of living in the patriarchy’s violent shadow. Kermani never advances a mundane explanation for this baffling, never-ending cycle of violence: Lucky is a surreal mind-screw right to the end. What follows is a bit like a feminist-thriller riff on The Trial, as May is assaulted again and again by the same figure, only to be abandoned, blamed, and patronized by those around her.
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The real shocker, however? According to her husband (Dhruv Uday Singh), this attack occurs every night. Indie-horror mainstay Brea Grant portrays self-help author May, whose life is turned upside-down when a masked stranger breaks into her house and attempts to kill her, only to abruptly vanish. It’s not quite accurate to describe Natasha Kermani’s ingenious and distressing Lucky as a “time-loop slasher flick,” but if that hook lures some prospective viewers into streaming this startling, existentialist marvel, so much the better.
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