Director Franck Khalfoun has given us some great films. He made a strong debut with P2, and also gave us the impressive remake of Maniac. So it's a shame that he has helmed this, a remake of a Spanish horror movie, Night Of The Rat, that I have yet to see (and, sadly, only going by this mess, am now not in any rush to see either).
Camille Rowe plays a young woman named Alice. We know a few details about Alice that are shown or told to us from the earliest scenes. She is supposed to be heading to an appointment at a fertility clinic, but she is also not necessarily as keen on the idea as her partner is, considering she seems to have just slept with a work colleague. Anyway, the film really gets going when Alice ends up at a gast station in the middle of nowhere, becoming the prey of a sniper who starts to speak to her through a walkie-talkie. That's the concept, and it is, in theory, a good one.
While Rowe does a good job in the lead role here, and while there are a couple of decent bits of bloodshed to punctuate the cat and mouse scenario, there's a disappointingly juvenile approach to the characters. For how good Khalfoun is as a director, his writing, with Glen Freyer (reworking that original screenplay by Rubén Ávila Calvo and David R. L.), is absolutely atrocious. Alice has to be full of flaws, a whole assemblage of traits that can continue to feed the rage of the sniper. That's bad enough, but the sniper himself is a complete caricature, the kind of guy who began his journey decades ago with conversations that ended with him saying "ït's political correctness gone mad", voted for Trump, gets enraged at the thought of someone specifying preferred pronouns, and wants to fight back against everything he perceives as "woke". IF viewers had more of an inkling that this was all an act, an attempt to fool our lead into misunderstanding their motivation, then that might be more interesting, and fun, but it doesn't ever seem that way. And neither Khalfoun nor Freyer given our lead enough time or energy to refute so much of the bile being spewed forth through that walkie-talkie.
I'll begrudgingly admit that the technical side of things is perfectly fine, with the lone gas station location and the nearby sniper location always shown well enough to maintain the correlation between the two. The audio and visual work is unspectacular, but always clear enough, and there's at least some extra solace to be gained from the fact that the runtime clocks in at just over 90 minutes. It also helps that Rowe is an appealing screen presence, otherwise this would have been completely unwatchable.
A real mess of a film, and one that suffers from the fact that those making it obviously believe they are delivering some kind of insightful commentary. Unfortunately, they end up embarrasing themselves by (inadvertently, I hope) presenting something that isn't too far removed from the kind of propaganda piece that would be endorsed by the likes of too-stupid-to-be-that-smart-too-smart-to-be-that-stupid Ben Shapiro and co.
3/10
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