Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Review: Don’t Look


Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2019
Images from the Internet


Don’t Look
Directed by Luciana Faulhaber
Enuff Productions / Wild Eye Releasing / MVD Entertainment
71 minutes, 2018 / 2019

Let me start off by acknowledging that I made a lot of notes watching this, so bear with me. It’s gonna be coming from both sides of the fence.

Let’s start with some cool stuff. First of all, it’s rare that the lead actor, Luciana Faulhaber, is also the director. And the fact that she’s a relatively young Latina is all the better. This is her first feature and relatively speaking she does a great job. I definitely had some issues with the first half, but in the long run, well done.

Filmed in Plowville, Pennsylvania, the standard prologue sets up the ending, but we don’t really get why for a long time, which is also quite unusual, and for which I’m grateful. When the story proper starts, we meet five friends who are on their way for a vacay in what was once one of their parents’ house, before the whole prologue thing. There are two relatively new couples and the gay guy. I’m happy to say that they do not pretend to be teens, but man, they sure do act like they are. They are supposedly in their early 20s, but physically that is still hard to buy.

My biggest issue with the first half of the film is that there is no single likeable character for the longest time. I believe a big rookie (and sometime seasoned) mistake is thinking the audience will react positively when an annoying character gets it, but there’s more emotion and connection in killing a likeable person than the douche; it feels more personal thereby making a better story. For example, the one guy I thought was sensible ends up being an idiot, too: a female characters is covered in blood and she just saw a body, and he’s not believing her (he can see the blood on her clothes and face), telling her to calm down and ignoring her by not taking it seriously.

Speaking of plot, with the exception of Nicole (Lindsay Eshelman, who was actually born in Plowville), whose backstory is loosely shown in the prologue, there is no interest to explain who these people are, how the know each other (unless I missed it during the car ride sequence at the opening), or what they do when they aren’t going to the cabin of someone where people were killed in the prologue. Also, again with Nicole, why would she go back to that place?

It’s easy to tell early on that Lorena (Faulhaber) is the man character, and this film is the debut director’s showcase for herself. If you’re wondering, no, that’s not a criticism. I see it all the time and it makes total sense to me. Lorena has the most screen time, close-ups, and widest emotional range. As a director (with Eshelman as producer), another wise choice is to have the central cast mostly made up of Latinos and an African American; the token white dude is the biggest douche of the batch, expressing white privilege left and right.

Another questionable scene for me is when one of the first couples goes off to some shed to, well, have sex. It’s great that we get to see some male nudity first before female (yay, women directors), including a couple of sly peeks at the peck. For me, what was weird though, was it is in a shed with halved pork meat hanging around the barn; she touches the pork, but no one in their right mind would do that with unknown meat, especially pork, which infamously smells bad when left in the open. This does lead into what I believe is a homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

This brings us to two interesting characters that use and live near said shed, hillbillies Kelley (Jarrod Robbins) and busty Sherri Baby (Hailey Helsick; named perhaps after Sheri Moon Zombie?). While they are attention-grabbing, they’re a bit over the top and cliché with highly violent and sexual overtones.

Okay, here’s a question that is meant in a non-critical way: when did killers start wearing baby masks? Was it The Purge (2013)? The Strangers (2008)? Thanks to some red herrings, the killer’s identity was not as easy a pick as I expected. This was a really fine direction to go. This was just one of the good choices Faulhaber makes.

The first half of the film, as is typical these days espically when they include the road trip as character introduction, takes a while to get a fire under it. At about the halfway point when one of our intrepid quintet starts going all Rambo and loading up, the pace picks up and the rest of the film becomes… better. The pace picks up and the excitement level rises. If you are not interested in any character per se but want some action, you can start it here.

The only extras are the trailer and a literally just-over-a-minute “Making Of” that’s kinda bizarre and pointless.

All-in-all, it does look like they had fun making it, which comes across to the audience.



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