For these type of hunter/hunted movies, like Hush or Curve, you need to create realistic set pieces that up the ante but don’t seem contrived. Don’t Move sets up this premise where a young woman has 20 minutes to get away from a killer before her body shuts down, but the film doesn’t even build up those moments. What’s the point of making this such a big driving point of the film’s marketing? The movie is exactly what its title suggests, an inert thriller that doesn’t go anywhere tense or interesting, and you might even find yourself not moving because you’re fallen asleep from the boredom of it all.
Iris (Kelsey Asbille) lost her son Mateo in a tragic accident, and that loss feels so insurmountable that she wants to take her own life. That’s where Richard (Finn Wittrock) finds her, at the edge of a cliff determined to end it all so the pain would stop. He’s calm and collected, and doesn’t go out of his way to convince her to continue living, but he does hope she will make that choice for herself. It is that shared moment of connection with Richard that helps Iris walk away from the cliff, and she follows Richard out of the forested area back to their parked cars.
So you can imagine how horrifying it is when Richard reveals his true hand, that he’s a serial killer looking for his next target, and he’s found that in Iris. He almost feels justified in what he’s about to do to her, since she didn’t seem to care all too much about whether she lived or not just 10 minutes ago. Iris manages to get away, but not before discovering that Richard’s already injected her with a paralytic – she has 20 minutes before her entire body shuts down. Then we enter the part of the film that’s supposed to be the most impactful. This is it, the 20 minutes that was advertised so ardently to all us frothing Netflix subscribers.
Yet, this is the most nothing part of the film, where she’s just stumbling about aimlessly before falling into the river, and just when you think she can’t move at all, she’s somehow able to grab on to a floating log that miraculous appears in the nick of time. If this is supposedly the most tense part of the film, at least film it in real time, make us feel the tension and stakes contained within that 20 minutes. But that whole sequence lasts barely 5 minutes, with her smartwatch the only thing letting us know that her time’s up. It just doesn’t feel realistic that she can just throw her inert body into a treacherous body of water and just be okay at the end of it all.
It’s not easy to emote while being completely still, but Asbille does a great job in letting us feel Iris’ palpable fear, through her eyes (that’s the only part of her that can still move) and her breathing. Wittrock’s believable as a serial killer and embodies a very Josh Hartnett in Trap kind of energy. But the movie handicaps the talents of these actors by placing them in uninteresting set pieces. I was so uninvested that by the end I wasn’t even looking forward to the moment where she would turn the tables on him, and gain the upper hand in their dynamic. A thriller like this needs to keep its protagonist safe but also make me believe that she’s in constant danger. If I never believe she is, then the movie has failed. Don’t Move suffers from a lack of jeopardy, and wouldn’t have even gotten this amount of attention if not for Sam Raimi’s name attached to it.
REVIEW SCORE: 2/5
