stephanie honaker

Mild, vague spoilers. Excellent villain concept, excellent cinematography (the creativity and execution of those shots was beautifully executed), color palette was on-point, fantastic score, but the way the twists were revealed was too little, too late, in my opinion. You know when you can guess all the plot points and twists so far in advance that the “big reveals” fall flat? There was a lot of that. The resolution in the end felt way too sappy and flat for me to feel totally happy about the choice to watch it. Instead of allowing the grand conclusion to play out, they just Have the character say what they’re doing in what I’m going to call a “heaven’s angel” exposition. While the angelic-style shot was a nice parallel to one of the references, it was so cheesy and blandly done. There was a plot hole regarding wound infection that could have been accounted for to build believability, since this film is less supernatural than a lot of Wan’s other blockbusters. Overall, I’d watch it again in the background just for the creature concept. It stuck in my head in the darkness.