The slasher movie is a perennial horror subgenre that continues to come back with new offerings time and time again. Netflix's latest entry is There's Someone Inside Your House and is a refreshing mix of old school and modern sensibilities when it comes to the genre. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it should satisfy genre fans just fine.
When a callous teen football star Jackson Pace (played by Markian Tarasiuk) is brutally murdered in his home by a masked killer, it sends shockwaves throughout his small town high school. Shortly after the crime, a video is sent via text message exposing the reason Jackson was killed: his extreme hazing of fellow football player, the openly gay Caleb Greely (played by Burkely Duffield). It doesn't take long for Caleb to be suspected as the killer, in retribution for the assault he experienced as part of the hazing, despite him being at the game at the time of the crime. Meanwhile, another group of friends that include Makani Young (played by Sydney Park), Alex (played by Asjha Cooper), Rodrigo (played by Diego Josef), Darby (played by Jesse LaToruette) and Zach (played by Dale Whibley) find the sudden outpouring of emotion for Jackson a little hard to stomach considering how awful he was to Caleb and the others. They even take Caleb into their circle when he's shunned by his usual friends as they suspect him being behind Jackson's murder. When a second classmate is murdered, the outwardly chipper and secretly cruel Katie Koons (played by Sarah Dugdale), with her darkest secret of being a white supremacist being exposed shortly after everyone realizes something serious is going on. There is a serial killer working their way through the student body, intent on exposing their victim's darkest secrets in the process. Makani, who has her own deep, dark secret and her friends fear they may be the next targets of this burgeoning serial killer who likes to wear a mask of the face of each of their intended victims.
The film was directed by Patrick Brice from a script by Henry Gayden and based on the novel of the same name by Stephanie Perkins. The filmmakers manage to create a film that is at once a throwback to the early 80's heyday of slasher flicks with the theme of past sins coming back to haunt the main characters was a common one for those films. Yet, the film feels rather contemporary as well. It doesn't get bogged down in the tropes of the genre and instead focuses more on the Whodunnit aspect of the story. To their credit, they did manage to keep me guessing even if an early suspect I had did turn out to be the perpetrator. I also appreciated the diverse cast, including an out gay character and a non-binary character. Patrick Brice and his crew do manage to craft some memorably tense sequences in the film including some suitably gruesome death scenes that genre fans have some to expect from movies like this.
The film assembles a cast of likable and fresh faced actors led by Sydney Park as Makani Young. Her character is easily the most fleshed out of the cast as Makani has recently moved from Hawaii to live with her grandmother due to a tragic incident in her past. Park does a good job conveying her character's inner turmoil as she attempts to deal with that trauma while putting on a brave face for her friends. But she also fear that same secret will put her directly in the killer's crosshairs. Burkely Duffield manages to make the most of his role, creating a lot of sympathy for his character as he finds himself unfairly ostracized. Dale Whibley is clearly having fun playing Zach, the rebellious rich kid who loves embarrassing his uber-conservative (and secret Nazi collector) father. Jesse LaTourette gives a good performance as the fiercely independent, non-binary Darby and was easily one of my favorite characters in the movie.
Overall, There's Someone Inside Your House is a pretty standard slasher flick. But as a genre throwback, it's a reasonably satisfying watch with some genuinely scary moments. It assembles a cast of characters that I found myself genuinely caring about and wanting to see make it to the end of the movie, which is always the mark of a good entry in the genre. It's a refreshingly pure genre exercise without any of the post-modern meta humor that films like Scream made popular, it's made well and is entertaining while it lasts.
No comments:
Post a Comment