Director: Brock Bodell
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Body-Horror
Plot:
Awakening inside a strange van, a woman tries to make sense of her captors' insistence on taking her to a special location within the hour to treat a mysterious infection working its way through her system, forcing her to rely on his strengths to get out of everything alive.
Review:
This was a rather solid if somewhat flawed feature. The main aspect going for this one concerns its central premise and setup, which manages to include a rather intriguing starting point as a means of looking into a potentially terrifying psychological problem. Starting off immediately with the awakening inside the trailer, the strange lack of communication with her captor, and the uncertainty of what's happened to her in such a scenario makes for a nice bit of intrigue regarding what's going on. With no viable escape attempt and plenty of suggestions offering up the idea of the woman carrying a secret that's about to come to fruition, the series of encounters here gets quite thrilling later on as everything comes to the forefront and requires a slew of intervention to successfully accomplish.
The problem with all this is that it never fully feels as though this can sustain a ninety-minute movie, requiring all sorts of weird tricks to escalate a running time that doesn't require it. From the endlessly droning philosophical or religious monologues that try to paint everything in a different light than what we're expecting and engender the kind of sympathy for his plight that something like this doesn't require, to the flashbacks and inserts used here to bring about a kind of overblown storyline that loses steam by the second act. Regardless of the intensity of the action and the shocking nature of the revelations at play, that this meanders around like it does makes for a challenging time here without much else to keep it going, and is the main drawback holding this down.
Overview: **.5/5
An intriguing enough if somewhat flawed genre effort, this one makes for a fun enough time for what it’s trying to do even though its issues are more than enough to keep this back from the upper echelons of the genre. Those with an appreciation for this kind of approach or who are curious about it will want to check it out, while most others out there should heed caution.
This review is part of our coverage of the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival. Click the banner below to check out our reviews and interviews from the festival:
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