The best way to enjoy this film is to go in blind. The less you know beforehand, the better. If you haven’t seen it yet and intend to stop reading now. As with Zach Cregger’s previous film, Barbarian, you don’t really know where it’s going until you get there.
Cregger gave an interview with the guys at Last Podcast on the Left and made a really interesting comment about the Alex/Aunt Gladys chapter of the film: “To me, it’s just about living with an alcoholic parent.” I knew a lot of Alexes (Alexi?) in grade school, and this made a lot of sense. Remember those friends’ houses that had parts like the basement that you were simply not allowed to explore?
One night at 2:15AM, all but one of the children in an elementary class sprinted out of their homes without a word. Where are they? Why did they run out? Why all from one class? Why did one boy not run out like the others? What the heck is going on?
A great movie, one of the best of the year. Other than what I wrote about(which is pretty much on the poster), I’d recommend going in blind. Don’t read reviews much, don’t look up any analysis. Just go and see this movie. This movie has received some praise and hype, but ignore that. It does live up to its hype in my opinion, but I was able to just go and watch the movie unfold with zero knowledge of it and that made the experience one of the best I’ve had in a long time.
Great movie, great cast, well filmed and edited.
I saw it alone, but immediately noted that my wife and I need to watch this the day it hits streaming. What a movie.
Great film, really mixes horror and comedy to great effect. (No it’s not a comedy, but there are scenes that had me and the rest of my audience hysterically laughing.)
Glad I saw it knowing nothing beyond the very basic premise.
-Huge plot holes: This is the biggest crime/mystery in the country. Every state police and FBI agent in the state would be all over this case. Meanwhile Archer “solves” the mystery by using a totally unique investigating technique of (checks notes) watching the videos and making straight lines of the direction the children were running. Apparently no one had thought of this? Apparently the police were so inept that they couldn’t trip up a grade schooler in their interview. The Witch is able to avoid detection by moving the children for 1 day. No agent thinks to watch Alex’s house?
-The only reason for the segments with the cop/tweaker were to put them into the house as zombie/enforcers. That’s it. Probably 40 minutes of screen time so they could chase/fight Justine and Archer in the house. Eliminate their parts from the movie and nothing in the story changes.
-There was nothing scary. When Justine falls asleep in the car and Alex’s mom comes out, it was almost scary, and then…she cuts Justine hair. Oh the horror.
-Plot armor - at some points the zombified victims have super strength, speed, stamina and know exactly where their victims are (even miles away). But Justine is able to hold off the cop, and a bathroom door holds off Alex’s parents.
-The dream of the gun does NOTHING for the plot.
In a Syfy Channel movie or even a cheap Netflix film, I wouldn’t have been surprised by any of this. In a film with high quality actors and the “best horror movie of the year” it seems pretty lazy.
Loved this movie and I’m still thinking about it even though I saw it a week ago now. My favorite part is it was a zombie movie but with the Voodoo type Zombies vs the Undead kind. You never see that anymore.
I also loved how the story unfolded with the different character POVs and how even if you took everything supernatural out, it was a really well done character drama.
What the police were doing this whole time is deliberately vague because that is not the story the film was telling. For all we know, they were off chasing down numerous red herrings that were a lot more promising than the possibility of a witch on the loose.
It’s a movie with literal Magic. Maybe she was clouding their minds? None of that was really the point of their movie.
If I were going to nitpick the investigation, on the day before all the kids ran away, all their name tags for their cubbies disappeared. That seems like a clue that at the very least the teacher would have noticed, if not a parent or the cops, but again none of that really matters.
I think the point is that they couldn’t have been investigating all that hard because it was not that hard a mystery to solve. I very much enjoyed the movie, and frankly I ignore issues like that when dealing with supernatural stories. If you can make zombies you can probably fool cops and throw off dogs.
That’s really the least of the holes you can poke into the big mystery, a bigger problem should have been the parents jobs/friends/family. But Like someone upthread said, that wasn’t the point of the story.
The more I think about it the more I feel the incompetence or reluctance of the police to solve the case is just fitting into the whole school shooting theme they had going. It just doesn’t hit quite right when they want to move on and bury the whole thing when the kids are missing and not dead.
Most of the police and adults are perhaps resigned to never understanding what motivates kids to do what they do. This aspect of the story was previously told in the series Adolescence.