This is an interesting film.
The setting it opens with is different.
A woman in recovery wrestling with the loss of her son.
The drug/recovery aspect is portrayed with a degree of focus and relative accuracy. Something you don't see in alot of movies.
As the movie starts to kick into gear it offers a pretty compelling and engaging journey into it's central theme.
Unfortunately, this movie has a very severe problem.
The acting. The main actress has a crucial flaw in her acting.
Whenever she should have a grimace or sadness in her face she is smiling.
And it looks like a smile.
She is competent in the rest of her acting though.
But this flaw in her acting is too severe to overlook.
I think it comes from a misguided film school tip of how to portray emotion.
I will explain it like this:
Alot of times we will see competent actors whose mannerisms when crying is very close to laughing.
This is something that is taught in more dubious film schooling.
That's why they do it.
And, of course, the result is dubious.
I think why she smiles when she's supposed to be grimacing is something she was taught in film school.
It's strange because her acting is otherwise adequate. But such a severe flaw in acting cannot really be overlooked or forgiven.
I liked the movie quite a bit while I was watching it. To me, the main story thread was a little new and different. For me it was pretty engaging.
But in the end it's just an average movie. I can see why it's rate so low here, with her strangely flawed acting.
But for me, even with the flawed acting from the lead,
I'll still give it a 6 because it does portray it's main theme/story thread in a good and relatively compelling way.
In this movie, everything is building to the final reveal. But this film does lack teeth. It's ultimately pretty tame.
This movie also has what I call a "modern horror feel".
What I mean by that is slick, simple and streamlined. A very simple concept and a very straightforward execution.
An example of a movie with a "modern horror feel" would be Smile.
Though I enjoyed that movie it still had that slick, simple, streamlined feel to it.
Films like The Harbinger(2022) for example, fall into this category for me.
Often films with this "modern horror feel" lack teeth. Or at least sharp teeth.
Now this movie has a sister cop interrogating and having close involvement with the main character, her sister.
This is severely unrealistic because a police officer would not be allowed to be involved in the investigation and interrogation of their own sister because of the very clear conflict of interest.
No police department is going to allow that.
In the end, this movie doesn't go too hard with the horror and that is an ultimate weakness of this film.
There is a quite interesting aspect of the final reveal but in the end it doesn't save the movie from the "decent-ish" category.
The final end is meant to shock and close with an umph but it fails and just comes across as a cop out(for me anyway)
