I watched the vast majority of this movie just hating it. It seemed like the plot was was just barely going through the standard horror tropes. All the main characters are bland or unlikable. The main actress is playing a plain and overlooked woman, but she's the most radiant one there.
So far, those are pretty typical problems for a horror movie. But the absolute worst problem is the pacing. Everything plods along with very little rhyme or reason. We get largely useless flashbacks. There are several abrupt time jumps that, instead of being effective, feel like scenes were just missing. One gap is probably eight months long, with no forewarning. With one of the victims there's a scene where we think logically that she surely must have been killed, but shortly after we get another scene where she's still alive and not even addressing having gone through anything earlier, followed quickly by a suggestion that she just got killed for real that time, but no actual scene explaining any of it. I think you're supposed to guess, but at that point it doesn't seem to fit what we know.
Closer to the end than it had any reason to, the movie took a wild turn. There was a quick succession of deaths, and a major mystery was revealed that I never saw coming. A couple of scenes were revisited, with a quick suggestion that there were other important things going on. But it's already over, credits are rolling. This was the making of a great movie. But it doesn't really work to just stuff it at the end like that.
This script badly needed a rewrite to take care of the pacing. The first two thirds of the movie should have been the first third, maybe. We got some hints, but there could have been a few more, maybe some red herrings. Parts that do not contribute to the overall plot (and a few characters even) should have just been ripped out. We needed more time at the end, and we could have seen some of the repercussions of what happened. It doesn't even have to all be denouement, if it were parceled out better we could process each step and build suspense about what that one was going to mean before the next one hit. And the loose threads could have been addressed in a satisfying way. For example, at this point I don't know if an important character lived or died, based upon what we know at the end.
I hope I danced around the spoilers successfully. Even knowing that there is a spoiler can in itself be a kind of spoiler, but I mention it so you don't give up on this movie before it's over. At least one of the reviews said they bailed before it finished, which is a shame. Fast forward a little if you have to, but don't just turn it off.
