An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this movie but, since it was directed by David F. Sandberg and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. To be honest, I have to admit that I had never heard of the videogame before watching this movie but it looked really cool. And that was actually the first disappointing thing, the fact that it wasn’t a direct adaptation but it was supposed to be an original story set in the universe of the video game instead which was a rather lame approach in my opinion. Basically, the end-result was some kind of horror riff on the ‘Groundhog Day’ time loop thing, which was not such a bad idea, even if it wasn’t really original as it was even pointed out by one of the characters. Eventually, it was pretty obvious that the main attraction here for David F. Sandberg was to be able to explore many horror tropes such as the slasher and found footage genres. It was after all his come-back genre almost 10 years after ‘Annabelle: Creation’ and I can understand if he wanted to treat himself. Unfortunately, it seemed that he didn’t really care about anything else. I mean, the cast involved (especially Ella Rubin, Odessa A'zion and Ji-young Yoo) was not bad at all, especially for a horror movie like this one, but all their respective characters were too limited and rather boring. In a similar fashion, the story was just barely developed at all. Basically, this group of youngsters ended up in this mysterious house and they got killed in a different fashion every night and that was it. Indeed, the movie had really nothing else to offer. I mean, the fact that they didn’t explain everything that was going on didn’t bother me, in the contrary, keeping the audience in the dark was one of the few right decisions they made. Unfortunately, the whole thing felt really empty with some barely fleshed-out characters with no clear goals facing some poorly defined antagonists just to see some supposedly ‘cool’ death scenes. Anyway, my rating might seem rather harsh as it was actually not so bad but I just didn’t care much about the damned thing after all. 

5/10