Director Amelia Moses
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Visiting his family for the holidays, a couple not only looking to celebrate their current engagement but also to partake in a long-standing community tradition known as Mummer’s Day but when she starts to believe the celebrations are hiding something more devious tries to get away before it affects her.
Review:
This was a highly enjoyable effort. One of the finest aspects here is the incredibly solid setup that provides this with a fun central storyline to play out. The main focus is on the game they play in the community which seems like the kind of feature that a group of people would bring up and bring up with those around them including the need for dressing up, the ceremonial masks, and the joke that sets everything in motion that all comes together into a solid enough feature here. That this is brought up in the middle of a solid secondary storyline where his return to the family and the cordial unease felt where he still feels guilty for leaving and having access to money through her that no one else in the community can match makes for a great time as he tries to make amends while they poke at him for it but not outright demand access to funds. This keeps them firmly likable while still creating a bit of a strain on everything which is the perfect tone here.
This also allows the more traditional genre setups to emerge rather nicely here. The fact that everyone is there wearing masks and wandering around in disguises as the point for the whole experience is lamp-shaded nicely when she points out the potential for a maniac to take advantage of it all to do something and get away with it, which then turns into the films’ scenes of the killer wandering through the celebrations unaware. Assuming that there’s something wrong but not sure who it is due to a series of pranks instead of the real culprit, there’s a nice bit of suspense generated here with the strange figure going around dealing out some brutal and graphic deaths that are handled rather nicely. As the finale features a series of twists and counterreveals for what’s going on that takes things into a genuinely unexpected direction that has some intriguing action here, these are enough to give this one a lot to like about it.
There are some factors here that bring this one down. The main drawback here is the sluggish pacing which keeps much more of a focus on the family relationship and the exploits of the celebrations rather than bring about more of a straightforward slasher effort. This takes until the hour mark to start bringing more of a focus on that matter, where even though there are stalking scenes here with his wandering through the crowd and picking off stragglers nothing happens to build off this kind of setup. That the final half turns into a bizarre kidnapping plot that’s quite a bit removed from the kind of stalk-and-slash that this one could’ve been involving a killer going around the festivities trying to knock off a group of revelers is the other big factor here where it becomes something completely different from the starting point and isn’t as interesting as the rest of the material that came before. This twist ends up doing a lot here and holds the film down.
Overview: ***/5
A somewhat missed opportunity that becomes quite decent, this one has enough to like about it while still being enough of a let-down that it’s kept from being what it could’ve been. Those who are intrigued by this type of feature or are curious about it will have the most to like here while most others who are turned off by the drawbacks of this one should heed caution.
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