Director: Francesco Gabriele
Year: 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Preparing for a special holiday, a group of friends heads out to a friend’s house in the countryside for a relaxing weekend together with a famous friend of the family, but as their stay continues, they realize that a masked killer has arrived at the house killing them off one by one.
Review:
Overall, this was a solid if slightly problematic slasher. One of the better elements with this one comes from the rather fun and engaging setup that provides this with the necessary excuse to get everyone together at the villa while getting to know them. The main motivation, involving the team coming to the house so that they can learn proper manners and etiquette from a celebrity who is staying with them, allows for a rather solid starting point to get this one going as a way to force them to the remote house where they’re cut off from everyone else. With the whole weekend built around exposing them to more cultured and mannered forms of interactions with each other through the coaching of a social media star they know who can help them, the retreat becomes a chance to explore not just the various means of looking into the teaching methods being used, but also the chances at exploring the background of the friend group, giving this a serviceable way of getting going.
On top of that, the stalking scenes here work nicely enough when dealing with the strange figure in the house, killing them off one by one. The message about the house being haunted by a ghostly figure is a decent enough starting point to handle the kind of setpieces later on, where the masked figure is shown standing around behind them with the intention of them striking shortly afterward. As the characterization points here help to fuel the drama about the different characters coming into contact with the savage figure stalking them throughout the house, giving this ending half of the film a rather frenetic tone that the finale comes together as, even if it does highlight the fact that so much of this is spent not focusing on this factor that there’s not much in the way of genuinely enjoyable horror action here.
This ties into the main issue here, where the pacing is immensely frustrating and sluggish tempo that has little going on for the majority of the running time. There’s quite a lot of build-up regarding the friend group and who they are, making for a fun time at first, trying to understand their background and purpose behind the visit, where they’re being taught fanciful manners and etiquette for polite society, takes up far too much of the film when it could’ve gone for a more overt genre tone and feel. There’s little about the interactions in the house trying to do this, which are interesting or enjoyable, and the attempts at making it connect to current lifestyles are logical so it all makes for a troublesome time that holds back the stalking scenes to such brief instances throughout here that just end up leaving them as those few spaces at the end where it doesn’t have much of an impact. Otherwise, the low-budget limitations are also a factor and lowers this one as well.
Overview: **/5
A watchable if overall troublesome low-budget slasher, this one could’ve had more going on for it than it does, as there are more than enough flaws here to keep this one down overall. Those with an appreciation for this kind of indie effort or who are fine with the issues present will have the most to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
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