Tell me a story

When a horror movie can integrate comedy in a believable way, I’m always a happy customer. As a teenager in the 90’s, I was in love with the self-referential Scream trilogy. In the early 2000’s Shaun of the Dead upturned the zombie genre and became an instant favorite of mine. Last year’s Cabin in the Woods took things to a whole new level by examining the audience’s love for horror films while being a horror film itself. This year You’re Next sidles up next to those great movies by combining genuine terror with a pinch of self-awareness and a smattering of funny, and if it has less character development than the above mentioned films, it’s because it purposely chooses to focus more on the situation than the actual people. In 8 out of 10 movies I’d be bothered by that, but You’re Next knows what it wants to do and accomplishes it, much to my enjoyment.

The premise is simple enough: it’s Ma and Pa Davison’s wedding anniversary, and for the first time in a long time their four kids—Crispian, Drake, Felix and Aimee— are coming to celebrate with them, and they’re all bringing their significant others. Plenty of bad things could happen based on that idea alone, and for a while it is the kind of bad you’d expect: Crispian (played by AJ Bowen) and Drake (played by Joe Swanberg) get into an squabble about Crispian dating his former student, Erin (played by Sharni Vinson) as the whole dinner party, Erin included, watches on. It’s in the middle of this barb-tossing match that things go from bad to horrible, like arrows-flying-in-through-the-window horrible. Everyone ducks and covers, and what follows is one of the most gruesomely fun games of cat and mouse I’ve ever seen.

So who is shooting arrows into the house? Is this a random attack of a sociopath or is it targeted? Who are the people hiding behind those creepy, yet kind of cool animal masks? Obviously I’m not going to answer any of these questions, but I will say that the path to these answers is spattered with a lot of blood. If you’re squeamish you might want to do some neck rotations before seeing this movie because you’ll be turning away a lot. The violence is truly wicked, and the film doesn’t shy away from showing you a lot of it up close, though if you’re a horror fan, you’ve seen worse. That could very well be a reason why You’re Next tries so hard to shock you with its violence; its target audience—the hardcore horror fans—has seen it all. So it’s rather an accomplishment for the film that some of its brutality has lingered in my memory for days after seeing it.

This awareness of the audience allows the filmmakers to do some really fun things. There is a way that these kinds of home invasion movies tend to go, and You’re Next subverts the genre by playing with how the whole cat and mouse game works. It ends up being a lot of fun and quite funny. I would guess that the most difficult aspect of creating a horror comedy is keeping the audience scared in and around all the laughter. The first two-thirds of You’re Next is wonderfully terrifying with a lot of the humor deriving from the sibling rivalry. The last third changes the tone of the film, and the sources of humor adjust accordingly. Just listen for how the score changes and observe the new mood that is created by it. There was plenty of humor in that shift alone. Then we start to learn about some of the characters’ motivations, and things get even more laughable.

You might be tempted to roll your eyes when you find out what’s really going on in You’re Next. Motivations end up seeming far-fetched, which is in large part due to the fact that we never get to know who these characters really are. The final dialogue exchange is preposterously silly. The movie could do more work to earn these credulity-stretching moments, but it chooses not to. And yes, maybe that does a disservice to the story itself, but I didn’t mind. There’s an early slow motion scene with Aimee (played by Amy Seimetz) that shows you exactly the kind of world this movie takes place in, and from that moment on you know that this world has room for silly motivations.

I never saw the original Evil Dead movies, but I did see the remake starring Jane Levy that came out this year, and I would tend to group You’re Next with it. Both are horror films that embrace the horror more than the film and end up being enjoyable for doing so, particularly because they also choose to embrace an aspect of absurdity. You’re Next won’t be for everyone, but if you’ve enjoyed any of the other films I’ve mentioned in this review, then I think it will be for you.

My Rating

You’re Next
Director: Adam Wingard ( V/H/S: “Tape 56″, The ABCs of Death: “Q is for Quack”, V/H/S 2: “Phase I Clinical Trials”)
Writers: Simon Barrett ( V/H/S: “Tape 56″ & “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger”, The ABCs of Death: “Q is for Quack”, V/H/S 2: “Tape 49” & “Phase I Clinical Trials”)