Fear the Night

Action/Suspense/Thriller home-invasion film written and directed by Neil LaBute and starring Maggie Q. The movie revolves around Tess, an Iraq War veteran and a recovering alcoholic, who returns home to attend her sister's bachelorette party at their family farm. The film takes a dark turn when a group violently invades the party, and Tess has to use her military training to protect herself and the other women from the violent assault.

LaBute stumbles into the common pitfall of romanticizing PTSD. Tess, like many of our real-life service members, unfortunately suffers from it, but the film falls into the cliché of presenting its symptoms as beneficial. In the movie, Tess's PTSD symptoms, such as heightened suspicion and strong startle response, coincidentally align with the actual threat present at the bachelorette party. This narrative choice can suggest that her trauma has somehow prepared her for this extreme situation. In reality, PTSD is a complex and often debilitating condition. It can manifest in various ways, including hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance behaviors, all of which Tess presents with in the film. However, it does not work as the sort of "sixth-sense" often implied in films, including this one, and is something people have to work hard at to overcome. In other words, in real life, people succeed despite their trauma, not because of it; this film has that backwards.

Despite these criticisms, the performances from the entire cast were good. The action scenes, although sparse, were solid and suspenseful, with LaBute's skill in crafting suspense seeing the film approach an ominous horror-like atmosphere. Anything with Maggie Q is always worth a watch, and not just because she's gorgeous; she's a phenomenal actor and her presence elevates any film she's in. It's a shame that LaBute didn't tap deeper into her martial arts skills and athleticism, which could have greatly added to the film's fight scenes. This film would have been a perfect showcase for them, and their inclusion would have only made a decent film better.

Overall it's a good one-time watch for fans of the genre. 6/10.

Trouble Iraq war veteran Tess (Maggie Q) attends the bachelorette party of her younger sister Rose (Highdee Kuan) organized by her older sister Beth (Kat Foster) with whom Tess has a strained relationship. On the night of the party, assailants surround the house and shoot at the group using bows and arrows as Tess using her military training to keep everyone alive and take down the assailants.

Fear the Night is a new home invasion thriller written and directed by Neil LaBute and starring Maggie Q for Quiver distribution and has recently premiered on VOD. Fear the Night doesn't stray far from the template of established home invasion thrillers, but it LaBute does create some pretty interesting characters thanks to his ability to create tense and uncomfortable situations from abrasive characters (such as In the Company of Men and Nurse Betty). The opening 30 minutes of the movie where Maggie Q's Tess deals with the unspoken awkwardness leading up to and during the bachelorette party kind of reminded me of the Karyn Kusama film The Invitation from 2015 in that much like how that film mixed horror tropes with an awkward dinner party setup, Fear the Night does something similar to an effective albeit not as successful degree. Once the action starts Fear the Night more or less follows most of the tricks and trappings of the home invasion setup but does add that little extra something by keeping some of the characters abrasive enough there's that lingering tension left over from before. The movie's also nicely bloody and with its lack of firearms and reliance on improvised or unconventional weaponry, we do get some fun bloody sequences including one scene with a potato peeler that will make many wince and cross their legs.

Fear the Night is the definition of a "solid rental". It's a familiar setup that's given just enough extra something to make it a reasonably breezy sit and has a solid performance from Maggie Q. For a quiet night in of violent fun you can certainly do worse.

A 6 is too high. Maggie Q is one dimentional here, but I will say she still looks good for 44.

The story is loose and several threads are intrdouced and left to dangle in the wind. The characters are not developed enough to care about any of them.

Also, all men in the movie are pigs or killers. Or that is how they are portrayed.

I watched half and fast forwarded to the end. Just too much dead space that does not advnace the film. Mild thriller. Never gets intense enough to grip you.

It is a very by the numbers girls in cabin with no cell coverage attacked by country good old boys bent on killing them for sport. But medicore script.

Maggie Q fans will dig it and there's a good movie in here, but you'll have to get through some rough dialogue before this action thriller starts to grab ahold. The title is pretty awful too. It's Assault on Precinct 13, Panic Room and The Purge set at a bachelorette party.

If not for Maggie Q, this movie only gets made by casting some friends for under $50k and winds up being released among the large mulch of movies that remains struggling to find an audience 10 years later. That's how not good the screenplay is. That's how poor some of the editing choices were. But there's still something here worth visiting.

I feel bad for Maggie Q. I really like her as an actress, and she should have never been in this movie. Everything about the film is so cringe. To the boring plot, the predictable scenes, the role your eyes "why on earth did you just do that?". Even the action scenes are boring and very few and far apart. The only nice part about the movie was the ending.

Eight girls take a trip out to the family cabin for a bachelorette party. Things go wrong.... Sounds like an interesting thriller right? There's no sex in the movie, very little gore and the blood looks like ketchup... It's so predictable and cliche and pretty much boring. Meggie Q was the only thing about the movie that was good. But one person cant carry an entire movie on their shoulders when everything else is horribly wrong with it.