Director: Chris St. Croix
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Trying to deal with her career, an online influencer tries to put a traumatic incident behind her by visiting a remote cabin home to get a handle on her next steps, but when an overeager fan kidnaps her and tries to get pointers for her career uses her darker side to get free and help herself.
Review:
This was a decent enough thriller with a few disappointing elements. The main factor going for this one is the fun central premise that generates a fair bit of intriguing elements from a rather familiar storyline. That we get as much as we do on the background of the main girl, who survived a traumatic experience with a stalker that disrupted her career just when it was getting started and sent her into a reclusive space to heal which is the start of her trying to get to the interest circle again and producing new videos for her fans at the cabin works as a great starting point to understand her psychological mindset. The difference between her early content and the more darker, world-weary persona she finds herself employing following the incident makes for a great setup to the shenanigans on display involving her distrust when the new girl shows up looking for help in her career, which triggered the kind of hesitant collaborations as she attempts to help grow her sphere of influence online.
This is all turned on its head when the tables are turned and the true motivation for being there shows up when it becomes apparent that she’s willing to resort to kidnapping and torture to get what she wants. The dynamic flips really quickly to the point of being mentally unbalanced. There are a lot of tense cat-and-mouse-style interactions, where it feels quite unsure what the end result is going to be based on the different tactics used and the background information revealed about whether or not she’s as sane as she claims to be. It all gets twisted around when the boyfriend arrives and starts getting far more vicious and unhinged, which is where the full survival horror aspects of the situation come into play as her skillset and darker persona make for some intriguing situations with everyone getting into deeper trouble than they expected. The main aspect here that becomes a bit hard to stomach is ironically the fan’s relationship with the boyfriend, which makes little sense for how they got together and stay in a relationship, but beyond that, it’s quite an effective contained genre effort.
Overview: ***.5/5
A fun if somewhat slightly flawed thriller, there’s enough going on here to be a solid and worthwhile feature that manages to overcome the few slight limitations that do crop up. Those with an interest in this style of genre fare or who are curious about it will have a lot to like here, while most others out there should want to heed caution.
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