Coming out in 2021 and being set in 2019, the comparisons with COVID are inevitable and pretty obvious in many places. At first it seems prescient how many aspects of the pandemic were reflected here, including the constant insistence by the only sane man that "This is not over" while everyone else around him is just obnoxiously blowing him off and trying to go back to normal, including a very over the top performance by the actor portrating the head of the CDC, in one interview basically suggesting this LV pandemic is going to be the end of "western civilization" then in the very next interview almost giddily blowing off any concerns about it, saying a vaccine isn't needed, and giving the most ridiculously cartoonishly evil grin while saying the best course of action against the virus is to intentionally expose yourself to it.
But the further you get into this movie, the more this starts to seem like a case of accidentally getting stuff right while in the course of telling a pretty dumb story that is let down not just by its obviously bad acting, but by it's immature writing.
The story is of a couple who are recording themselves (or rather just the wife) due to her sleepwalking. Almost immediately it's incredibly suspicious that it's not just normal sleepwalking and the husband slowly starts to dig deeper into it.
I was initially impressed with what I thought was basically an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type story with a COVID setup, marred only by the obviously bad acting all around. If this was the first time for everyone involved, this would've been fairly simple to overlook.
But the further along it goes, the more it starts to show that this isn't a case of just bad acting, but really bad writing. A whole lot of the dialogue and exposition is written the way a child would write about the real world, without a full understanding of how things work, or the complexities of people's emotions and how they react to traumatic events or confrontations. It does a huge disservice to what could have been a promising enough story.
