Fuck me next to your dead mom!

You’re Next Review

A film that embraces its genre trappings with glee and merriment while at the same time feeling fresh and vibrant in a sea of schlock and over complicated plot that dominates the genre.

The film starts off with Crispian and Erin on their way to Crispian’s family cottage for his parent’s anniversary.  Upon arrival it is evident that all is not well, both with the house and the family. The house is eerie, full of dark corners that squeak in the night. Meanwhile Crispian is the black sheep who struggles to achieve the seeming success of the rest of his brood. Meanwhile Erin is left in the focus as being somewhat strange and different. It doesn’t take long for the lives of this WASP style family to crumble all around them.

It all starts with a funny rip on pretentious filmmaking, before devolving into a trifling argument between siblings. All seems set for your typical family drama about meaningless life achievements when your piggy bank can never run dry, courtesy of your really well to do parents.  That is, until, BOOM! A character is killed mid-dinner. From then on it’s an all-out struggle to survive as these privileged white folks scramble for their wits. No you’re generic bloodletting does happen but it happens in an interesting manner.

There is no discernible order in which to expect a character’s death and yet all the plot clichés are there. You see each death coming but part of the surprise is which character will fall to the specific method of execution. The deaths are gruesome, but not overly so. Unlike the torture porn films of the Saw franchise, the film does not revel in the kill by drawing it out. Instead it focuses on having you soak in the atmosphere that embodies the scene of each kill. In a credit to the writer, the kills themselves are fairly quick and are in completely appropriate in their approach to the goal of the killers. To say anymore may give away far too many details. You know you can’t help but you plead never the less.

It is in these moments that the last girl cliché gets up, but not to run as we have come to expect. Erin is an ass-kicker and Vinson does it well.  In contrast to all the screaming and whimpering vixens and victims that populate these films, Erin takes the lot that life has given and deals with it. The filmmakers take great care to show that she isn’t your typical horror lead who takes three quarters film to finally start kicking ass with an almost magical, instant competence. Erin on the other hand maintains a rock solid competence throughout the film, creating a sort of predator versus predator dynamic.

The look of the film is typically, full of deep dark colours and bold, icky blood. The real pleasure is the tone that the music invokes. A blend of synth-pop and creepy tones sets to invoke a mood of idyllic despair grown from years of broiling yuppie discontentment. While it doesn’t completely serve to engross you in the moment it does serve to show you that the film knows its roots and it knows how to intelligently achieve its goals without straining the realm of plausibility, as we’ve come to expect with the low end thriller films.

As a point of interests, fans of Hotline Miami will definitely feel at home thanks to the masked villains and a similar soundtrack.

At the end of the day this film is no game changer like what the first Saw was. But maybe that’s a good thing. Shot cheaply and smartly the films serves to harken back on old genre tropes while also twisting them just enough to breathe some fresh air into a genre that is short on originality. That and it gives us one of the best lines in film “Fuck me next to your dead mom”.