“This is one of those what’s in the box? horror movies where you find out what’s in the box so late in the movie that you don’t get a lot of tension out of it.
I think it’s sort of a try at the Jaws thing, or the Alien thing where you don’t show the monster too early. Which only works if you show me the threat the monster brings, even if you’re not showing me the monster.
I see the carnage from Bruce the shark or from the xenomorph, but in this one, I don’t see that, don’t see the monster, don’t really see anything spookier than lights turning off until the last 15 minutes or so.
It’s also one of those deals where watching it a second time would collapse the logic. Why do lights turn on and off when she’s not in the house? Why are women targeted? How did she get out of those chains?
Ending Spoiler:
I really have grown to dislike movies, usually horror, where the hero overcomes a mystical, psychological force because well, because she’s the main character. There’s nothing in the movie’s logic that would lead me to believe that she could overcome it and no one else could. She just has this sudden burst of mental toughness or something. This isn’t an ability or a thing we’ve seen up to this point. It just arrives when we need it.
I just could’ve done with I replay the memory over and over. She tells me she brushed my hair 100 times.
Then the monster gets it wrong, I brushed your hair 1,000 times. You know what I mean? Something where this memory is so burned into the hero’s brain that when tiny little details are off, she’s got a reason to figure it out.
Maybe I should put it like this: Transformers, the animated movie, tells us about the matrix. It’ll open in our darkest hour. It’s introduced early, used unsuccessfully once or twice, then works when it’s needed, which is also when the audience has been given time to forget about it and has begun to doubt its power.
When your movie is less plotted than Transformers, dude, c’mon.”