DON'T MOVE (2024)

Studio:   Netflix
Director: Adam Schindler, Brian Netto
Writer:   T.J. Cimfel, David White
Producer: Sam Raimi, Zainab Azizi, Alex Lebovici, Christian Mercuri, Sarah Sarandos
Stars:    Kelsey Asbille, Finn Wittrock, Moray Treadwell, Daniel Francis

Review Score:

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Summary:

Injected with a paralytic agent, a resilient woman must escape a relentless killer while battling against her own body.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Leaving her husband behind in bed, Iris drives to Massey Big Sur State Park where she despondently leaves a toy boat at a makeshift memorial for her young son Mateo, who died there in an accidental fall. After carving their family's initials into a tree, Iris walks to a nearby cliff and prepares to jump.

A man who identifies himself as Richard interrupts Iris's suicide attempt. Richard convinces Iris to reconsider killing herself by sharing a story about how he lost his daughter Chloe in a tragic car accident that deeply traumatized him. Iris shares the story of Mateo's death and its effect on her.

When they return to their cars in the parking lot, Richard suddenly tazes Iris, restrains her with zip ties, and begins driving away with her in his backseat. Using her pocketknife, Iris cuts herself free and slashes Richard, causing him to crash his car into a tree. Following a struggle, both of them fall out of the vehicle. Richard taunts Iris by revealing he injected her with a paralyzer that will cause her body to lose mobility before completely shutting down in 20 minutes.

Iris flees into the surrounding forest with Richard calmly following. Iris tries hiding, but she is forced to leave her hiding spot when ants swarm her. To escape Richard, Iris crawls to a nearby stream and floats away in the rapids.

Iris crawls out of the water and collapses as her watch's 20-minute timer expires. Bill, a man living alone in a remote cabin, finds Iris paralyzed while mowing his lawn. With Iris able to blink yes and no responses, Bill uses a wheelbarrow to bring Iris inside so he can call 911 for help.

Richard comes to Bill's door claiming to be a distressed man searching for his injured wife. Iris blinks a warning to make Bill wary of Richard. She then manages enough movement to hide beneath a couch.

Initially uncertain of what to believe, Bill ultimately realizes Richard is a threat. Bill pushes a bookcase onto Richard and calls 911. A fight ensues that ends with Richard using a knife to kill Bill. With authorities on the way, Richard sets Bill's cabin on fire, collects Iris, and drives away in Bill's truck.

Richard receives a phone call from his other daughter and his wife Lizzie. Richard is frustrated to learn his family has decided to crash his solo weekend in the woods and will be coming to his cabin later that evening.

When Richard stops at a gas station, Iris manages to attract the attention of a boy and his mom. They don't directly interact, but the mother ends up calling in Richard's suspicious vehicle.

Richard drives back to his wrecked car to collect a change of clothes as well as more zip ties and paralyzer. As Richard begins attaching straps to tow away his car, California Highway Patrol officer Dontrell Carter arrives in response to the mother's call from the gas station. Dontrell becomes suspicious of Richard's cover story. When Iris manages to mouth "help me," Richard beats Dontrell to death with a heavy towing cable hook.

Iris begins regaining some of her faculties as Richard drives them away from the scene. Iris tries getting into Richard's head by talking about his first daughter's death.

Richard brings Iris to a pier. Iris stabs Richard with a syringe full of paralyzer, but she isn't yet strong enough to push down the plunger.

Iris asks Richard why he didn't just let her die at the cliff. Richard contends her experience with him has given Iris a new appreciation for life.

Richard rows Iris out onto a lake to kill her. Tricking him into making himself vulnerable, Iris stabs Richard through his throat with a fishing knife. Iris also recovers Richard's gun and fires wildly. Richard dives into the water and swims away.

Damaged by Iris's gunfire, the rowboat starts sinking. Iris holds her breath until she resurfaces from being submerged.

With much of her body back to normal, Iris swims back to the pier. Seeing Richard also made it to shore, Iris goes over to him. Iris says "thank you" before leaving Richard to die slowly from his gruesome injuries.

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Review:

"Don't Move" uses imagery, not words, to set the stage. Foreshadowing events yet to come, Iris lies motionless in her bed, gazing emptily up at nothing. A man sleeps three feet away in a position facing away from her, indicative of the divide between them. Iris rolls over in the opposite direction, trading her view of the ceiling for a toy boat she somberly stares at on the nightstand.

Iris quietly steps out with the boat and a pocketknife, but leaves the man and her cellphone behind. She then drives to a deserted state park where she uses the knife to carve initials into a tree. The toy becomes another memento for a makeshift memorial bearing a little boy's photo. Evidently, Iris's son tragically died there. Her mourning complete, Iris moves on to one last action that ends up not being as final as she thinks.

At the edge of a nearby cliff, Iris clutches her fists, contemplating suicide to stop her silent suffering. That's when she's interrupted by Richard, who speaks the film's first words. He's not necessarily there to help her, but he shares a similar story about losing a child that compels Iris to reconsider life's worth. Their commiseration complete, the two of them return to their cars in an empty parking lot.

Suddenly, but not unexpectedly for the viewer, Richard tazes Iris, binds her with zip ties, and drives away with her struggling in his backseat. Richard's supposed compassion masked murderous intentions. Now Iris finds herself readying to fight for a life she thought she was ready to end.

Subgenres in the horror/thriller space have their work cut out for them when it comes to creating new takes on old concepts. If a movie means to redo "Dracula" for the umpteenth time, for instance, it had better do something none of the countless other adaptations have already done before.

To make a unique footprint in well-trodden woodland survival territory, "Don't Move" introduces a countdown clock to turn up the heat on the otherwise plain pressure cooker Iris finds herself in. Injected with a paralytic agent, Iris has just 20 minutes of increasingly difficult mobility before her body fully shuts down. Once the timer expires, she goes from a person to a prop that gets lugged around like a log, except in scattered instances where she miraculously summons enough strength to move or make sounds, because how else can a plot push forward when the heroine should be a sack of dead weight?

"Don't Move" can be a nailbiter if you're inclined to sympathetically grind your teeth or grip your seat for scenes like Iris attempting to hide only for ants to swarm her while Richard lurks overhead. Yet there's not a lot for a viewer to emotionally latch onto because the only thing we know about Iris is she lost her son and became suicidal because of it. Should she survive so she can appreciate a Shawnee Smith-like revelation about life, or is it enough to just want an underwritten character to escape a vanilla villain?

"Don't Move's" action isn't overly harrowing. After escaping the ants, Iris crawls to a river and floats away. This would have been a perfect opportunity for raging rapids and jagged rocks to present expected obstacles. Instead, she bumps a bit in the current and drifts downstream, none the worse for wear.

Wouldn't you know it, the exact spot where Iris emerges from the water is also the exact spot where an old man living alone in the woods happens to be mowing his lawn. Whatever the odds of that coincidence are, they're probably about equal to the odds of Richard knowing exactly where to find Iris, which happens mere moments after the man, Bill, wheelbarrows Iris into his cabin. Inserting another character introduces another opportunity for suspense, except we already know Richard has homicidal intentions, so his cat-and-mouse confrontation with Bill becomes a mere matter of when, not if, Richard's cover story gets exposed and their faceoff erupts in violence.

"Don't Move" continues relying heavily on serendipitous events and "you've got to be kidding me" behavior to keep its wobbly plate spinning, which amasses an amount of disbelief not all viewers will be willing to suspend. Richard needs gas for a vehicle at an inconvenient (for him) time. A Highway Patrol officer, who is deeply suspicious of Richard yet still turns his back on him anyway, later pulls him over at a critical moment. At least a line of dialogue openly admits how dumb it was for Richard to not check his captive's pocket for a knife.

It's well within the norm for a movie to test the limits of realism within an escapist fantasy, but "Don't Move" doesn't deliver substantial or unpredictable shocks worth ignoring its structurally flawed fiction. Emblematic of Netflix's curious appetite for average thrillers that only hover around for one brief weekend, "Don't Move" chops up another log for the fire of films whose details rapidly fade until eventually, you can no longer remember if you actually watched it or not.

Review Score: 50

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