crimsonlh

This film feels like a hodgepodge of several tropes around amoral rich people that doesn't say anything new, challenging, or even particularly interesting. Although Skarsgard was compelling in certain parts, the character he played was bizarrely underdeveloped, making much of the latter half of the film uncompelling. The pacing felt off and there were a couple obvious opportunities for foreshadowing or plot twists (purposeful red herrings, perhaps) that weren't followed through on but could have made the story much more interesting.

The science fiction aspect has such potential as a premise, including in the setting of the film, but it somehow falls by the wayside in favor of decadent shenanigans. Ultimately disappointing to me as both a sci-fi fan and a horror fan.

This is a story about kids being resourceful and resilient in the face of a predator. The performances of the child actors are compelling, the diversity of the children character's personalities and backstories is intriguing, and their relationships to each other are surprisingly well-established and nuanced.

I think some of the criticism can be explained by a difference of perspective: they're seeing it from the viewpoint of adults, when the story is from the viewpoint of the kids. Of course the adults are basically useless--this is a story about kids, that's how it works. Why should there be more backstory for The Grabber? This isn't a story about him, it's about the kids beating him.

This story is driven by the children characters and their individual efforts culminating in bringing down someone who in every conceivable way has the advantage over them. They're resourceful, clever, scared, angry, confused, frustrated, determined, and it all *works*.

Genuinely, the climatic showdown is one of my absolute favorites. The teamwork and the callbacks are stellar and triumphant. What would have normally required a lot of suspension of disbelief becomes believable because we saw everything that led to it, all without it being repetitive.

If you like stories about kids triumphing against/despite adults, if you like stories where the victims are resourceful and take their attacker down, if you like stories with a strong Chekhov's gun element, if you like character-driven stories featuring nuance about family and friendship dynamics, you might like this.

It's well-lit, the scenery and set are lovely, but the plot uses what seems like a lot of genre red herrings that don't pay off because nothing is delved into, explored, or explained enough for the developments to be impactful.

There's not enough exposition or establishing of the characters in the beginning, and then things seem to be hitting on different horror tropes, which can work well for keeping an audience in suspense. The problem is that none of it is explored in a way that makes it compelling; it just moves on to the next trope without any explanation.

Maybe they were trying to rely on the audience being genre-savvy to figure things out, but there's so little commitment to anything that it all ends up shallow and unsatisfying. Then at the end, what is supposed to be a major reveal falls flat because there's so little context actually established that it makes the clues useless.

It's a shame--I usually really like horror set on a boat because the claustrophobia and lack of options tends to easily build dread or desperation, but this movie didn't even effectively utilize that.