A mysterious woman appears out of nowhere, sits in a broken family’s yard and delivers cryptic and threatening messages.
Starts off great and then rapidly deteriorates. Second collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Danielle Deadwyler after Carry-On (2024): https://kaygazpro.com/carry-on-2024/ – a totally different film. So, what’s to be expected here?
From a filmmaking perspective, Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography is brilliant—camera angles, framing, lighting—all of it! Deadwyler (Ramona), Okwui Okpokwasili (Woman), and the kids perform brilliantly. The sound design and the editing serve the narrative the way they are supposed to. That leaves us with Sam Stefanak’s script and Collet-Serra’s visualisation.
The story is solid. A mysterious woman appears out of nowhere and delivers cryptic messages. Who is she? What does she want? What is the family’s secret? All that unfolded quite well until they decided to disclose the answers. The way it was decided to provide those answers killed the mystery as much as it killed the horror. And then, it resurrected it and brought it back as the epitome of incoherence. While there is an explanation, standard Hollywood narrative dictates confusion before oversimplification with the sole purpose of the “WOW” effect. That also killed the drama, by the way.
There is nothing good to say past the first act, so I’ll leave it here. Jason Blum keeps producing films that make zero sense, and their rationalisation is borderline dangerous. Where they are getting at follows a similar mentality with The Beast Within (2024): https://kaygazpro.com/the-beast-within-2024/. The filmmakers imply one thing, but connect it to another. And that “another” is significantly scarier and far more concerning, and shouldn’t have been connecting to the “one.” See for yourselves if you want to waste your time.
Thank you for reading!
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