A rattled, former mother is being terrorized by a psycho killer for reasons unexplored. Oh and said killer injects said, former mom with a serum to paralyze her. The plain to see title for my latest review is 2024's Don't Move. "What did you do to me?" The question is what doesn't he do, to everybody.
So yeah, one character in "Move" says to another character, "are you crazy". Crazy as all get-out. We're talking a family man here by night and a manipulative, murdering loon by day. Don't Move could easily be titled uh, "Get a Move On". Yeesh!
Anyway "Move" was filmed mostly in Bulgaria, a backdrop of mainly forests and lakes that seem straight out of a Friday the 13th vehicle. And despite a few gruesome moments of sudden barbarity and torrid retribution, Don't Move is still a rather unsatisfactory, horror set piece from two unseasoned directors (Brian Netto, Adam Schindler).
Uh, why you ask? Because Netto and Schindler seem to think they can do a retread of 2020's Alone and critics like me wouldn't notice. Think again boys. Alone is the gold standard for young-women-escaping-deranged-scourge thrillers. "Move", well it sadly lacks Alone's inching tension, assured plot points, and mounds of bullying suspense. I mean it all feels so standard and just because you have a hook of the protagonist getting rendered powerless by the antagonist, doesn't mean the flick is pukka. It just makes it reek of unnecessary discouragement.
Don't Move stars Finn Wittrock as the poor man's Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Kelsey Asbille as the even poorer woman's Ellen Page (when Ellen Page was Ellen Page). Their performances aren't exactly bad, it's just that their personas are ill-defined in a movie so compact and trivial it might as well be a DVD once delivered in the mail by Netflix (when Netflix started out being Netflix). Busted "move".
Written by Jesse Burleson
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