Rating: B
Dir: John Fallon
Star: Kevin Interdonato, Nick Baillie, Melissa Anschutz, Alix Lane
Well played, movie. Well played. Within about 30 minutes, Chris had come to the firm conclusion that, as she put it, “They all fucking need to die.” I wasn’t inclined to argue, due to the combination of obnoxiousness and rank stupidity unfolding in front of our eyes. And, yet: here we are with a distinctly above-average rating. How did we get here? Settle in, and I’ll tell you. We begin, after an ominous quote from Nietzsche, with the McCabe family going for a holiday weekend to their very nice cabin, by a lake in the Pocono Mountains. There’s politician dad – step-dad, actually – William (Baillie), his wife Lauren (Anschutz) and their teenage daughter, Erin (Lane). Except, everything is not as picture-perfect as it appears.
Erin is unhappy, and not just for the usual whiny teenager reasons, e.g. a barbaric lack of wi-fi. Mom is a raging alcoholic, swigging vodka straight from the bottle. And William? Bad, creepy vibes from the get-go, and that’s before he has rough sex with a not-exactly enthusiastic Lauren on the kitchen counter. Chris’s IDGAF meter was beginning to spike, and things only got worse. For then, Jesse (Interdonato) shows up at the door, his truck having broken down nearby. In complete defiance of Home Security 1.0.1, rather than the family just calling a tow-truck, he’s invited in for dinner, and before you can say “Very poor decisions,” he’s mixing them drinks. It was around this point Chris expressed the opinion provided above, as the three McCabes wake to find themselves tied to the couch (top).
You should definitely stick with it though, since you will eventually discover, things are far from as stupidly simple as they seem. It quickly becomes clear Jesse is no random burglar, and is here with a very pointed agenda – specifically, to make William take responsibility for his sins. These are many, to the point not even Jesse knows the full extent of them, and neither does Lauren. Complicating matters, two other gentlemen show up at the door, also seeking to have a quiet word with the owner of the house. Oddly, their presence is never explained, and ends up more of an irrelevant distraction, because it takes away from the savagely focused tension of the situation inside.
When I say “savagely”, I mean it. The violence here is not necessarily gory or extreme; it’s mostly fists to the face. It still has a relentless impact to it, reminding me of the kind you get in S. Craig Zahler’s movies. It’s brutal: I commend whoever did the foley work in particular. Very crunchy. The further you get into this, the more what has happened makes sense, with one revelation at the end in particular that will click a lot of pieces into place. We end almost as we came in, with a blood-drenched William, lying bound and gagged on the dock. However, virtually everything has changed around that – quite probably including where our sympathies lie.
The film is now out on DVD and digital in the US.