I have had a great feeling about this film since I saw the trailer. I loved the idea, the concept of the story and the complexity it all sounded and I can confirm this is a film worth seeing.
Now in all honesty, I can see this film becoming a future cult classic just simply because it's a very iconic film and what helps that is the incredible cast. Elizabeth Moss delivers a powerhouse performance as a abuse victim who is struggling to get her life back together and as the film explores her mental state, she is just so convincing as this broken, damaged woman. Oliver Jackson-Cohen shows how intimidating he can be in the small amount of screentime he has and the rest of the cast have a nice presence and are mostly extremely likable.
What I also liked about the film is how it explores the aftermath of the abuse this woman has suffered. It takes a nice brisk pace to show how an abuse victim can feel once they're out of this sort of relationship and how it mentally affects you. You can tell the cast and crew wanted to get it right and director Leigh Whannell does that with such sensitivity and realism.
What Leigh Whannell also does brilliantly is create such tension and avoids a lot of horror cliches. There's no cheap jump scares, he makes one scene all tense and cranks up that tension to 100 to the point you cannot take your eyes off the screen and he also doesn't rely on jump scares to bring horror to the film. That restaurant scene is still stuck in my head.
But what I also loved is he takes fill advantage of the camerawork. He leaves it filming in big empty spaces to make us believe something will happen to, once again, build up the tension and with some incredible sequences, it's all filmed in one take. There's no quick edits to trick the viewers or anything.
Now on a mixed aspect of the film, at times it feels like this film doesn't know what it wants to be and it changes genre within each act. The first act is a horror film, and the second act is a psychological thriller with some black mirror-esque styled scenes added into it. Now I say it's mixed because I personally don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. However it is very noticeable and at times distracting from what you think you're going to be expecting.
Now it's time for the negatives: first of all, my biggest frustration was the story mainly focuses on the aftermath of the abuse story it's tackling. I would have liked the movie to have shown the origin story of how the couple first met, how the abuse developed and show us how it came to the events we saw in the film. In fact, watching the film, I spotted a lot of places where flashbacks could be taken place to show us the realities of the abuse but instead we got told about how bad it was and that left me quite disappointed.
Also some of the plot twists were quite predictable and one of them I wish they hadn't have done for a number of reasons: first it's too underdeveloped and if it wasn't for the final act, it could have killed the whole film for us. Second, it makes the film more convoluted than it really needs to be and at times made the storytelling feel very clunky afterwards. Third, it's a twist that just felt forced and not a lot of sense.
Despite all that, this truly is an iconic, incredibly tense and powerfully acted film that I'd highly recommended to everyone and is a clear example in this day and age, it's still possible to create a horror film that has some original scares.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
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