Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Adam Schindler, Brian Netto
Starring: Kelsey Asbille, Finn Wittrock, Moray Treadwell, Daniel Francis
For as long as I can remember I've had a recurring dream where I'm being
pursued by someone or something only to find that I can't move my legs. I
end up stuck in one place, awaiting my fate as whatever it is that's on my
tail makes its way towards me before I'm rescued by my alarm clock. With
Don't Move, directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, and writers
TJ Cimfel and David White, have created a thriller that's
literally the stuff of my nightmares. Like the dream I can't shake, it
features a prone protagonist, but there's nothing ambiguous or metaphorical
about the antagonist, who is simply another predatory man with a God
complex.
Don't Move opens with an arresting prologue that could
function as a short film in its own right. Unable to continue living, Iris
(Kelsey Asbille) drives out to the mountain range where her young son
died after falling off a cliff. She plans to end it all by jumping from the
very same cliff, but she's interrupted by a passerby, Richard (Finn Wittrock), who quickly realises what she's about to do. Richard knows exactly what
to say to talk Iris down, using some reverse psychology and an anecdote
about his own grief over the girlfriend he lost in a car crash. "Broken
doesn't have to mean hopeless," are the words that get through to Iris, who
pulls her feet away from the cliff edge and walks back down to her car with
Richard. But just as they're about to say goodbye and move on with their
separate lives, Richard knocks Iris out with a stun gun.
Waking in the back of Richard's car with her hands tied behind her back,
Iris manages to free herself and cause Richard to crash his car into a tree.
But as she prepares to flee she learns the grim truth of her predicament:
Richard has injected her with a drug that will cause her body to completely
shut down in about 20 minutes, and she will remain paralysed for roughly an
hour, giving him enough time to get her to his cabin.
The ensuing cat and mouse game plays out in something close to real time
and resembles an actual encounter between a cat and a mouse as Richard toys
with his prone prey. With her body out of action, Iris is forced to use her
head, or more specifically her eyes, to survive. Much of the tension comes
not from the presence of Richard, whom she initially escapes, but from
Iris's attempts to interact with would-be saviours while in a
non-communicative state. The film leans heavily into its battle of the sexes
aspect by mining tension from our fears that Richard might be able to win
over Iris's potential male rescuers with his well-rehearsed patter, claiming
at various points that Iris is either drunk or hysterical.
Don't Move is most effective when it focusses on the
body-horror element of its premise, often resembling a thriller reworking of
the scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Dicaprio struggles
to crawl to his car while paralysed by quaaludes. There's something primal
about our fear of losing control of our body, and
Don't Move recognises this by pitting the sort of obstacles we
usually avoid - crawling insects, fire, rising water - against the immobile
Iris. But the movie never fully exploits this aspect and you might find
yourself wishing it had been made by some French lunatic - a Fargeat,
Ducournau or Aja - who might devise some grislier sequences.
Don't Move suffers from being a little too refined and
tasteful, with Iris unfeasibly maintaining control of her bladder and an
unrealistic lack of immediate sexual threat from Richard. Perhaps the
biggest missed opportunity here is the film's lack of interest in
interrogating the idea of a man stealing a woman's agency and bodily
autonomy, even if via what would generally be considered a good deed.
There's really only one satisfying ending to Iris's narrative, but no
mainstream American thriller, certainly not one acquired by Netflix, would
dare to go there.
