Lee Henderson

I usually have pretty favorable takes on movies and I want to be fair to this one, too. There are things to respect here. Some good foreshadowing, for example, that I only noticed in retrospect. The creepy aura that persists through the whole thing is nice, too. However, the bad parts of the script and the movie itself were so upsetting that I would strongly recommend not watching this movie in theaters and if you are, to be as prepared as possible. Essentially the whole plot is straight out of most women's worst nightmares, and I mean that literally. A group of powerful men lures some pretty girls to an island, tortures and assaults them at night and makes them forget everything during the day. It's super triggering, even if you don't have a direct connection to the topic. However, the reason it bothered me is because the logic in the movie rarely made sense and a lot of it was just not explained, the themes of trauma and how it shapes people were brought up but not really fully explored and sometimes I was just straight up offended by the way they did certain things. The movie ends up being misogynist even where it's trying to come off as feminism, and I couldn't help but feel like it was still viewing some of the female characters as little more than sexual objects much of the time. That's the cost of under developing characters that you are willing to show getting chased, tackled, assaulted, tied up and crying, gagged on the floor, etc. Speaking of underdeveloped characters, I was really upset with the way they handled Lucas, the young blonde man. I'm not sure what they were going for with him. We see him acquire a black eye from one of the other men and see him balled up and sobbing in the trauma flashbacks with another man looming over him. But then Slater has this speech where he accuses Lucas of "doing nothing" and says there is a "special place in hell" for people like him. That felt insanely victim blamey and unfair to this guy. He could not have done anything to help them and was literally beaten into submission, surrounded by bigger, older men with weapons. If this is the filmmaker's attempt at trying to talk about complicit bystanders, it really misses the mark. Lucas's victim hood is brushed aside and literally mocked by the script, and I just felt bad for him. I liked the actors. They did a good job getting across the themes through facial expressions alone. Massive kudos to them. But I frankly wish I had not seen this movie and don't encourage you to, either.