TILL DEATH (2021)

Studio:      Screen Media
Director:    S.K. Dale
Writer:      Jason Carvey
Producer:  David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Jeffrey Greenstein, Jonathan Yunger, Yariv Lerner, Les Weldon, Tanner Mobley, Jana Karaivanova
Stars:     Megan Fox, Eoin Macken, Callan Mulvey, Jack Roth, Aml Ameen

Review Score:

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Summary:

A woman chained to her dead husband’s body encounters even more madness when she must also survive a deadly home invasion.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Emma Webster breaks off her extramarital affair with Tom, an attorney who works at her unfaithful husband Mark’s law firm.

Although suspicious of his wife’s infidelity, Mark takes Emma out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary. Mark gifts Emma with a necklace she later discovers she cannot remove. Even though it is winter, Mark then takes Emma to their remote lake house for a romantic evening.

When she wakes the next morning, Emma sees that Mark handcuffed the two of them together. Mark suddenly shoots himself in the head. Emma gradually discovers Mark preemptively foiled her attempts to unshackle herself from his corpse by removing all sharp objects, only putting one bullet in the gun, dropping her cellphone in water, and draining their car’s gasoline. While in the car, Emma hears a prerecorded message where Mark taunts her.

Having been lured as part of Mark’s plan, Tom arrives at the lake house. In addition to the affair, Tom reveals that Mark’s office was raided and the potential career scandal likely contributed to his suicide.

Bobby Ray, a criminal on parole after serving a 10-year prison sentence for violently assaulting Emma, comes to the lake house with his younger brother Jimmy. Bobby Ray stabs Tom to death, which shocks Jimmy.

Emma hides in the boathouse. Emma finally breaks free from Mark’s body by hacking off his hand with a boat anchor. Jimmy and Bobby Ray enter and find Mark’s body. While hiding beneath the boat, Emma overhears a conversation during which Bobby Ray and Jimmy reveal Mark hired them to kill Emma and they are to be paid with diamonds hidden in a locked safe upstairs.

After a series of hide-and-seek searches, Emma attacks Bobby Ray and Jimmy with a golf club. Emma makes it outside to Bobby Ray’s truck and calls 911 on his cellphone, but Bobby Ray and Jimmy recover in time to stop Emma’s escape and break the phone. Bobby Ray knocks Emma unconscious.

Emma recovers to find herself back in the bedroom and chained to Mark’s corpse once again. Uncomfortable with his brother torturing Emma, Jimmy starts a standoff with Bobby Ray. Emma agrees to give up the safe combination on the condition that she be freed from the cuffs. The exchange takes place. However, inside the safe, Bobby Ray only finds a message indicating that the diamonds are in the necklace locked around Emma’s throat.

Unable to break the necklace with bolt cutters, Bobby Ray prepares to decapitate Emma. Jimmy grabs his brother from behind to stop him. Bobby Ray inadvertently pushes Jimmy backwards into a wall hanger that impales Jimmy’s head.

Emma and Bobby Ray fight. Emma manages to handcuff Bobby Ray to Mark’s body. The two of them get into a chase and struggle that eventually leads to the ice outside. The ice breaks. Bobby Ray falls into the frigid water below with Mark’s corpse, but he drags Emma with him.

Emma ultimately stabs Bobby Ray in his eye and wrestles her way free. Bobby Ray drowns. Emma breaks back through the ice and climbs to safety on the surface. Sirens are heard approaching.

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Review:

I can appreciate the straightforwardness of a simple plot, and “Till Death” has one. Stranded in a remote lake house, Megan Fox ends up shackled to her dead husband’s corpse and has to survive an attack by intruders. That’s all there is to it, and that’s a great start.

What sucks though, is when you’re well aware of what the premise is, yet you still have to sit through a really stretched setup just to get to where you already know you’re going. In “Till Death’s” case, the first act clock ticks for 24 minutes before the handcuffs finally click. Granted, some sort of background buildup has to take place. But a full third of the film is a long time to repeatedly wonder, “Will they get to it already? How many shots does one movie need of people walking around while sending suspicious stares at one another?”

Eoin Macken lays it on thicker than a milkshake made of fog as the husband who suspects Megan Fox of having an affair. He gives one of those vaguely villainous performances that’s mostly made up of subtly suggestive statements and potentially threatening leers that seem to say he knows what’s up, yet can the conspiring characters be 100% certain? It’s clue #1 that “Till Death” deals in soap opera suspense that’s deeply dependent on disbelief. As end credits rolled, I tried picturing what a real-life news story would look like if it recounted Megan Fox’s ordeal in detail. I had to laugh at the notion because there isn’t a person in the world who could possibly buy how every increasingly crazy event unfolds. This is definitely something that only happens in the movies.

At that 24-minute mark, “Till Death” rouses snoozy viewers with a wild wake-up call. Unless it’s previously been spoiled, the way in which Fox winds up hitched to her dead husband rockets right at you as all kinds of mentally messed up, kicking off the crux of the movie with a proper shock indicative of the insanity that follows.

Jason Carvey’s script starts out smart in that it anticipates every eyebrow anyone is likely to raise regarding Fox’s peculiar predicament. Why doesn’t she use her cellphone to call for help? Why doesn’t she find something sharp for sawing through the chain? Why doesn’t she escape in the car used to drive there? “Till Death” thought of all of those same questions and answers them by baking explanations into the core concept.

Carvey’s script doesn’t stay clever, however. “Till Death” gets caught up in clichés when two thieves arrive, one of whom is the nervous toady type whose guilty conscience didn’t sign up for the violence perpetrated by his partner. Fox, of course, happens to hide somewhere she can inadvertently eavesdrop on a serendipitous conversation during which the criminal duo lays out key details regarding what they’re doing there and why.

At this point, “Till Death” turns into a rather repetitive series of hide-and-seek scenes, cat-and-mouse games, and other “ooh, they almost got her!” situations. We’ll see Megan Fox holding her breath somewhere, the camera will cut to a stalker creeping up on her location, then when he gets there, suddenly she’s gone! Fox moves to a new spot, maybe a little something gets put into play for later, and a similar sequence takes place that ends with a “where’d she go?” moment.

Before that point, “Till Death” drags its feet more mundanely by filling up on shots of Fox pulling the corpse from one place to another while huffing and puffing. That’s the flipside of simple setups. They don’t often open doors that can fill a feature with 90 nonstop minutes of innovation or imagination.

Although it too hits a number of familiar notes, “Till Death’s” action-intensive finale flies by with entertaining ferocity. It’s a reminder that the recipe for a successfully satisfying viewing requires seeing “Till Death” as an R-rated Lifetime drama that takes a sudden turn into Stephen King-style horror. The creators basically built a home invasion thriller out of a hook that’s enjoyably devilish, if a little daffy, but also intermittently dull. Besides, how seriously should an audience take something like this anyway?

Review Score: 60

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