Director: Scott Goldman
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Psychological
Plot:
After hearing of her cancer prognosis, her son begins caring for her to help bond over their final moments together which only results in a spiraling session where his mental deterioration state manages to get him in bigger trouble than he expected due to the lack of care he receives.
Review:
This was a generally troubling indie effort. Among its better aspects is the solid psychological build-up of the estranged relationship at the core of the film that’s slowly unveiled within this one. As we get bits about the relationship between him and his mother that starts bringing about the idea of the psychological issues within him as well and we get further scenes involving his feverish beliefs in him being a werewolf that inflicts his entire life. With that spurred on by a traumatic incident itself and slowly causing his life to spiral rapidly with plenty of different examples brought about by his interactions with family or a mental-help support group that only further his mindset and condition. Knowing what we do about him throughout the film and how everything sets off a murderous instinct within him, the bloodsoaked rampage in the final half makes a lot of sense involving some graphic moments as his snapped behavior sets everything in motion.
However, there’s one main overriding factor against it in that these have to be done to a figure that we’re sympathetic to and care about for everything to have the most impact. Here, we never get that with a rushed setup with everything taking place at such a rapid onslaught of imagery and setpieces that it’s impossible to get a handle on what’s going on as the interactions with his mom come out of nowhere and have little emotional resonance to them immediately getting introduced to an antagonistic relationship that has no stakes. It doesn’t make much of an effort to introduce anything sympathetic about him or explain away the horrific visions and hallucinations he suffers from so everything simply hangs around with little rhyme or motivation since everything is so ambiguous about being real or in his head. Had this been given a more proper introduction at the start, there would’ve been more of an impact as his mental stage constantly deteriorates the longer he goes on so this context goes a long way towards helping this one out.
Overview: ***/5
A really enjoyable if still somewhat disappointing genre effort, there’s enough at stake here to be a worthwhile and watchable effort but has some big factors holding it down overall. Give this a shot if you’re a fan of the approach taken here or are fans of the creative crew while those turned off by these factors or are expecting a more traditional genre effort should heed extreme caution here.
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