Russell Cohen

Throughout the film I just kept saying, “Worst Ricola commercial ever” although the film takes place mainly in an untouched and evidently lawless area of Sweden, and not Switzerland. Frankly, I don’t get the hype over this film. It’s just a ripoff of The Green Inferno but with gauzier fabrics, mounds of fake flowers, and the same ole group of gullible ethno-tourists thrust into a cultish ritual ceremony that lasts for days and in this case involves a lot of spiked sun tea. It’s too on-the-nose tropes of the hackneyed “Monster in the House” plot line makes it thematically predictable and the characters disposable. You are never given a reason to invest emotionally in the characters and that is the film’s fatal flaw. I didn’t care who died and knew beforehand exactly who would. SPOILER ALERT - the verrrrrry slow to get started film is basically premised on a douchey guy who wants to break up with his emotionally damaged (justifiably so) girlfriend so he and his other douchey friends have to die too in order to heal the girlfriend’s emotional wounds??? And horrors! The leading lady spies her boyfriend getting it on with another girl and starts dry heaving??? Okaaay. Plus he was drugged so cut him some slack! All in all, not my cup of tainted tea, but I did like the architecture in the village and the bear costume.