Director: Robert Cuffley
Year: 2021
Country: Canada
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Psychological
Plot:
Following a traumatic workplace accident, a young woman placed on leave decides to visit her family across the country and decides to stop over a motel for a bit of rest and relaxation, but the longer she stays in the strange room the more she finds her sanity slip away as the events of the past continually come back to haunt her.
Review:
There was a lot to really like with this one. The fact that it turns a rather simplistic and formulaic approach into a rather fun and gripping thriller. Shown to be grappling with addiction issues and an unresolved grip on the past before being afflicted by the trauma while at work, we're given a nice backstory to understand her psychosis from the start of the film. This goes a long way to understanding how the stay at the motel begins to affect her as the past trauma and grief over what happened in her life begins to get more pronounced, tying nicely together with her addiction issue to create a confounding setup that tests her sanity quite well. This builds up rather well as time goes on where she stays at the hotel long enough to have lost all semblance of reality based on the situation she finds herself trapped in and the mounting stress of being alone at the motel which combines together into an appealing, hallucinatory-styled series of scenes throughout here.
This all builds ominously throughout the middle part of the film where it gets far darker in terms of on-screen imagery and threat to her mental state that it’s far more chilling than expected and serves quite nicely as a result. There isn't much really slowing it down, but it tends to grind to a halt when the creepy neighbor is also shown to be at the motel. While it admirably shifts before whether or not he's real or part of her psychotic mindset, the fact that they're scenes together aren't that crucial to the storyline and tend to feel like padding to stretch the running time out. The finale, as well, seems a little rushed as it seems to just rush into a resolution that doesn’t entirely feel earned based on the build-up before-hand as this is figured out where it’s going quite early on with very little of the moral intended to be taught being applied. Still, this isn’t truly detrimental as these factors only end up lowering the film just slightly as a result.
Overview: ***.5/5
An impressive minimalist type of story that manages to get a lot to like while only featuring a few minor issues that aren’t all too damaging which are not enough to factor against this one considering its positives. Give this a look if you’re intrigued by these low-budget indie efforts or a huge fan of this kind of psychological slow-burn, while most others won’t be satisfied by the slow pace and lack of action leaving for an unsatisfactory experience.
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