Shudder Saturday: Bad Things (2023)

Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) has just inherited her grandmother's hotel at the start of Bad Things. That kind of sudden surprise could easily be the start of a sweet romance, the springboard for an "underdog overcomes the odds" feelgood flick, or just an outright comedy. The fact that Ruthie is staying at the hotel with her partner, Cal (Hari Nef), a friend named Maddie (Rad Pereira), and another friend, but one who might want more than just friendship (Fran, played by Annabelle Dexter-Jones), maintains all of that potential for a selection of light-hearted options. Bad Things isn't light-hearted though. It's a horror movie, and one that seems to focus most of all on absence, whether it's the absence of real guests in the hotel, the absence of real regret, or the absence of Ruthie's mother, a woman who has helped to make Ruthie the mess she seems to be.

Much like a certain other horror movie set in a fairly empty hotel, Bad Things is all about the deteriorating mental state of the main character, a fragility and nerviness that is exacerbated by others around her. Things are strained between Ruthie and Cal, something Maddie is very much aware of, and Fran seems intent on adding to that strain, especially if it means that she can convince Ruthie to choose her over anyone else. Meanwhile, a jogging couple keep turning up around, and sometimes inside, the hotel, and there are a few other individuals who seem to appear just long enough to make people doubt their sanity. 

Writer-director Stewart Thorndike might not be making her first feature, that would be Lyle (2014), a film that sounds interesting enough for me to seek out at some point, but she definitely works well with fairly limited resources to deliver an impressively unique and female-focused horror that moves slowly, but purposefully, from an atmosphere of carelessness and slight worry to one of panic and real danger. Cinematographer Grant Greenberg prowls the corridors of the main building, often showing other characters at a slight distance, whether they are recognisable to viewers or some of the strange interlopers about to unnerve one or two of the leads, and the score by Jason Falkner is a brilliant blend of the simple, the quirky, and the outright menacing.

The acting styles vary between the leads, but everyone feels like a good fit for the role given to them. Rankin is the eye of the storm, in many ways, and those around her struggle to keep themeselves rooted safely to the ground, for different reasons. Dexter-Jones wants to get closer to her, while both Pereira and Nef try to maintain a certain distance, the latter out of a self-protective urge to avoid being hurt once again by a partner who hasn't been on her best behaviour recently. Jared Abrahamson has a couple of memorable scenes, and I enjoyed the fact that he was never really depicted as more than just a minor annoyance, and fans of Molly Ringwald will be please to see her onscreen for a few minutes, in a role that actually makes excellent use of her in such a limited amount of screentime.

Many will watch this and be turned off by it. It's a deliberately obtuse and challenging piece of work, a horror of internal stress and damage being transformed into external dangers. Get through the first scenes, however, and start to soak up the atmosphere of it, and you will be rewarded with something both thought-provoking and satisfyingly unnerving. It's a character piece, and a look at some different relationship dynamics, but it also remembers to deliver proper horror movie moments.

8/10

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Assassination Nation (2018)

Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike the Scissor Sisters? It's not really them that I dislike, they had a couple of hits that were fun and annoyingly catchy, but the way they seemed to be viewed as the pinnacle of naughtiness and wit by middle-aged, middle-class people who viewed leaving their socks on during an unplanned quickie as the ultimate in sexual kinkiness. I know that's an unfair generalisation to make. I also know that I've met far too many people who would seem to be in that category.

I mention that now because Assassination Nation is a film I view as similarly mistaken for cool and edgy, when it is often just desperate and juvenile. It wants to be shocking, clearly, but it's a film that feels tame and out of date already.

Odessa Young is Lily Colson, a young woman living in Salem. She has a boyfriend (Bill Skarsgård), and is also having a lot of fun, to put it one way, with a married man she calls "daddy". Lily starts off as a relieved bystander when a hacker starts to reveal sensitive private information belonging to town residents, but it's not long until she, and most of her friends, becomes a target. Everyone has their secrets, some have more than others. And all of this dirty laundry being washed in public eventually leads to emboldened and angered men becoming abusive, and assholes thinking they should make everything right by punishing those they see as being most immoral and/or causing the situation.

The second feature to be both written and directed by Sam Levinson, Assassination Nation has a few good individual moments. It's just a shame that they are drowned out in the hyperactive mess that makes up the rest of the film. And one of those better moments basically plays out over the end credits. Levinson obviously wants to comment on our modern habits (all of that data that can be out there for every one of us, be it text messages or emails or photos, jumping to the wrong conclusion about something and not listening to reason if it doesn't suit our argument), but he undercuts everything by appearing to run through a checklist of trigger warnings that are provided at the very start of the film. You get a great sequence, for example, of a man trying to explain why pictures of his young daughter in the bath don't make him a pedophile, all while a large crowd is baying for his blood, but you also get a plot point about Lily being fed up with her boyfriend's refusal to go down on her. There's a guy secretly hooking up with someone who is transgender (in scenes that reminded me of Cruel Intentions), the constant threat of being targeted by seemingly-brilliant hackers (see a LOT of movies and TV shows from the past decade, not least of them being Mr. Robot), and an escalation of heated emotions as more and more secrets come out (in scenes that reminded me, oddly enough, of the third act of Needful Things). Assassination Nation is far from original. It's also just a bit silly, certainly by the time it is pushing things even further for the big finale.

Hey, I mistrust the general public, when being coerced into one mass sway of opinion, as much as the next person, but even I couldn't buy into just how quickly things went from 0 to 100 here. The film may be a heightened experience, with everything deliberately ramped up to dangerously excessive levels, but that doesn't make it work any better. I probably would have enjoyed this more as a live piece of theatre, something that really COULD have felt more intense and daring, depending on how uncomfortable the audience was made to feel. As a film, however, it starts to fall apart during the opening scenes.

Young is fine in the role of Colson, and she makes more of an impression than any of her co-stars (with the exception of Hari Nef, and kudos to Levinson for having an actual transgender actress playing someone transgender). Skarsgård adds another toxic male role to his list of them (he does them so well), Colman Domingo is superb in his role as the school principal, and Joel McHale tries, and fails, to overcome the silliness of the script with his performance.

It's made well enough, and the good amongst the bad makes it just about worth your time, but Assassination Nation totally drops the ball. I get what Levinson was aiming for, and there's an argument to be made for the style matching the content, but the most important points are too easily drowned out by the cacophony of irritating excess.

4/10

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