Wanting today to attribute an editorial line to a film company is a chimera, especially if we take into account the current state of the industry, but it cannot be said that there are no studies that in recent years have not bet on a series of more or less clear filmmakers and themes. There they are Annapurna o A24that has grown a lot since its beginnings allegedly indiesbut also Blumhousethe producer born under Jason Blumbased since its inception in the fertile and productive genre of terror.
His reference study condition for terror has not prevented Blumhouse from testing different proposals over the last years. One of his most celebrated films in recent years was The invisible mandirected by a strong man from the house as Leigh Whannell (One of the minds behind the saga Saw Together with James Wan) but that supposed a breath of fresh air to a genre that was already looking for a constant renewal through the banally called “high terror.” Without wanting to look in the mirror of the new voices of Ari Aster, Robert Eggers o Jordan Peelethe truth is that The invisible man It was a more than lucid review of the myth created by H.G. Wells introducing the issue of domestic abuse, but doing it in a very elegant and especially effective way, through the formal, using the off field to create that concern not only its protagonist, but to the spectator himself.
The invisible man He returned the hope of being able to make commercial films with a social fund, combining background and form in the best way and reverence a whole literature classic now transformed into a very current monster. Blumhouse does not seem to have left the same play with his most recent monster, The werewolf, But for a company that produces between five and ten films per year, a bump can always be raffled. And Blumhouse has decided to overcome it as soon as possible, and with another director who knows about: Christopher Landon.
The same year that premiered The invisible man He did it too Freaky, entitled in our country This body feels my deatha film that parodied body change films “This body is not mine, put on my place-, but taken to the genre of terror, and more specifically, to slasher. Its director, Christopher Landon, had already tried that formula with his great success, HAPPY DAY OF YOUR DEATHa film that took advantage of the famous trope of “Marmota Day” – that is, of the premise of In time– To combine knife with youth anxieties.
Landon’s roads and the largest youth saga of knife and scares with parody and target touches, ScreamThey seemed destined to meet. And they did so for a brief period of time, enough for the director to leave the new installment of the saga just a few weeks after having accepted the position. What happened in those weeks is a more complicated mystery to solve than the identity of Ghostface In any of his deliveries, but the fact is that Landon returned to the Blumhouse skirt and started working on another project. Although it is already known that when one stops doing one thing and puts another one, it is very likely that in that process he ends up doing in some way what he already had in mind.
Only in this way is a movie like The appointmentthat reaches theaters this week and that could be summarized as what would happen if the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock Know the time of romantic appointments apps. Violet (Meghann Fahy) is a psychotherapist who lost her husband in the most traumatic way possible and that has been far from quotes, focused on raising her little child and protecting her from the tragedy that pursues them. When weapon of value and accepts having an appointment with a man, Violet begins to receive a series of strange messages. Messages that will force him not to take off the mobile’s gaze, but also to disregard his romantic appointment (Brandon Sklenen) in a luxurious Chicago restaurant.
Such a premise might seem that it does not have much to do with the saga created by Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson – who has finally relieved Landon in the next installment – but the truth is that the perverse relationship that Violet entails with the other person next to the phone is very similar, without knives in between. The appointment Also retrograt Last call or the recent one Hand luggage of the Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra, although Landon makes more hand of psychological terror than of pure and hard action, which he reserves for his third act.
Despite its moderate ambition, the film never ends up finding the balance between the romantic comedy of the situation – the encounter between two strangers who need to love again – with the thriller and the psychological terror caused by the extortion that Violet suffers on his phone. The film works by repetition and although it starts as a whodunnit solvent, as the plot progresses, everything becomes more unlikely, and in which it is impossible not to think about The rope of Hitchcock, although the ghost of English is more flying over than of present body.
When Landon finds his knives, metaphorically speaking, the film enters its peak and you can see some talent and bad milk of the director, but it is too late and, above all, it gives the feeling that too much time has been lost. The trauma of the past, domestic violence or panic that means being blindly with a person you only know through a screen and that the same can be a serial killer as your next great love are ideas that go through the film as fast as the dishes that the clumsy waiter serves, but that never tastes at all. It gives the feeling that, as happens to the protagonist, Landon is distracted, absorbed in other things, and that perhaps this was not the film he had in mind. And, as Violet, you will have to keep the mobile ignition just in case. You never know at what time Ghostface can call again.
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