Fear the Night, 2023.
Directed by Neil LaBute.
Starring Maggie Q, Ito Aghayere, Philip Burke, James Carpinello, Travis Hammer, Kat Foster, and Highdee Kuan.
SYNOPSIS:
Eight women at a bachelorette party in a secluded house are targeted by a gang of rednecks and must try and survive the night.
Fear the Night is a home invasion movie that promises much but fails to deliver, either as a straight thriller or as some sort of commentary on the genre, which is where you would suspect writer/director Neil LaBute would want to go in a sub-genre that is already over-stuffed and relies on either heavy plots or decent characters to make any impact.
Unfortunately, Fear the Night has neither of those two things as LaBute seems content to offer up obvious stereotypes in a plot that could have been more engaging had any of the backstories or character tics that get suggested gone anywhere, but the movie feels like the filmmakers shot the first draft of the script, said “That’ll do” and put it out.
In a workmanlike plot, Tess (Maggie Q) and her sister Beth (Kat Foster) are going to a secluded house in the California hills with a group of friends for a bachelorette party to celebrate their other sister Rose (Highdee Kuan) getting married. It is obvious from the start that Tess and Beth do not get on, mainly due to Tess being a former soldier and suffering the effects of some sort of PTSD that makes her feel alienated from ‘normal’ social gatherings, so there is an uneasy tension between the two women, but thanks to Tess getting into a back-and-forth with three rednecks who see a group of women out partying as something to rudely comment on when the ladies stop at a local store, things escalate when said gentlemen arrive at the house that evening, armed with bows and arrows and demanding to be let in. When one of the party is killed, Tess goes into soldier mode in a fight for survival as the group have to overcome their issues in order to make it through the night.
On paper, the plot is nothing special but there are little details that could have – or should have – been exploited to make the action a little more intense. Sadly, in execution Fear the Night is also nothing special as it offers up nothing that you cannot see coming a mile off and is made in a way that has very little in the way of flair or style, which would have made some of the kills a little more exciting seeing as the narrative elements are a little flat.
Maggie Q is very good as Tess, going full-on action heroine in a group full of clucking female caricatures, which was obviously intended to show us how different she is from her peers but there is nothing beneath the surface here so Tess comes across as aloof while the rest of the group screech and shout at a male stripper; yeah, we get it but what else have you got? Give us more than repeatedly inferring that Tess has issues but not actually making them clear.
If Fear the Night had gone the route of insane, OTT carnage the underwritten plot – the real reason the rednecks are trying to get inside the house is extremely lame and clearly an afterthought – wouldn’t matter as there would be plenty of visual stimulation, but the movie plays it very safe in every department, never getting overly gory to compliment the grindhouse-style story, nor is it clever enough to lend itself any weight as an intelligent thriller, happily languishing in the middle and never playing to either crowd in a satisfying way.
At its best, Fear the Night ticks the boxes for a rental if you really are stuck for something new to watch, but when you break down its content into individual parts there is actually very little here that you haven’t seen before, and when it does feel like it is going to step outside of convention and try something daring, it just doesn’t. For positives, it doesn’t really drag despite being padded out, and the lead performance from Maggie Q is strong, but that really is all it has going for it.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
