The Menu, but make it glampop.
That's reductive, and not entirely true, but the heart of the two movies is the same. And, while the journey here feels similar, the destination is much different.
Ayo Edebiri is so good, just compulsively watchable and effortlessly cool.
Malkovich is at the top of his game in this. He gets to do the weirdness but grounds it in a truly remarkable way—this is no cartoon.
It's also got great music. In most storytelling,…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
I dropped this a half-star on the rewatch. I just feel the ending is unnecessarily obfuscated—we have been witness to the story (a kid even looks at us during the scene at the cliff) and, as such, the horror is in Dani's acceptance and, more importantly, our complicity in her acceptance. By trying to hedge the ending in what is, I suppose, a bid for "discussion" or "leaving room for interpretation," the ending actually weakens the film by not making us uncomfortable with how happy we are for Dani.
Is it possible to misunderstand the appeal of a property more egregiously than this movie does? It feels like someone took a bottom-of-the-barrel horror movie script, said, “Yeah, we can shoehorn in the Book of the Dead and then have various characters say familiar lines so we can put Evil Dead in the title and hopefully make more money that way.” Ugh. Where’s the camp? Where’s the humor? Where’s the actual horror? What an absolute waste of time.
This is a truly singular piece of art. It wouldn’t work any other way and the way it works makes almost no sense while making complete and total sense. It pulls the neat trick of seeming as if it is going to disappoint you only to subsequently blow off the top of your skull.
