This week on Gimmicky Thrillers Theatre is Don’t Move (now on Netflix), a movie about someone who… can’t move. At the risk of sounding like a pedant, “don’t” implies choice, while the more accurate word for the title of this movie is “can’t,” considering the main character is injected with a paralyzing agent in order to easier facilitate her kidnapping. I’ll stop there with the nitpickery (no GET A DICTIONARY admonishments from me, bro) and get on with mentioning that the biggest name involved here is producer Sam Raimi, who gives collaborative duo Brian Netto and Adam Schindler an opportunity to direct their first feature, starring Yellowstone’s Kelsey Asbille as the kidnappee and Finn Wittrock as the kidnapper. It has its moments.
The Gist: Iris (Asbille) can’t get the image out of her mind: The long drop from a scenic cliff in a gorgeous California forest. That’s how her toddler son died. Now she stands in that same spot, adjacent to a little memorial shrine to the boy, wondering if she should join him – but she’s not alone. Richard (Wittrock) comes upon the scene. He’s calm, genial. He pieces it together, that the smiling kid in the photograph is hers. He seems to know what to say. All the right things to get her to back away from the ledge. He shares how his wife died in a car wreck. “The world takes what it wants,” Iris says. This is where she’s at right now, a stage of grief. A raw one.
Richard persuades Iris to follow him back down the trail to the parking lot, where he slowly alters his tone from friendly to creepy and zaps her with a stun gun and binds her with zip ties and throws her in his backseat. She comes to, and he further illustrates what an instantly hateable S.O.B. he is by explaining how he injected her with a drug that will soon temporarily paralyze her. It’ll take 20 minutes to kick in, and the diabolical thing is, she’ll be immobile but conscious enough to know exactly what this godawful human being is doing to her. Diabolical.
Did we mention that, back before Iris drove out to the woods in the first place, she was at home, and at home she grabbed a Swiss army knife? The movie takes pains to show us that she does, indeed, grab a Swiss army knife. A Swiss army knife that comes in handy during the moments prior to her being unable to move, so she uses it to cut the zip ties and make Richard crash the car so she can run away. He follows, but he’s not in a hurry. The drug will take effect soon enough. She stumbles and scampers and hides and ants crawl on her face and really, it’s all just a matter of time until she’s inert and Richard very much is not.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Don’t Move, Don’t Breathe, Don’t Look Up, Don’t Look Now, Don’t Say a Word, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Don’t Let Go, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and, um, Don’t Breathe 2. Oh, and Wittrock’s psycho character could be the younger brother to Josh Hartnett’s psycho character in Trap.
Performance Worth Watching: Honestly, there isn’t much depth to these characters. But Wittrock gives us a convincing display of sociopathy that maintains our interest, if only in our desire to see him get what he deserves.
Memorable Dialogue: Before all the evil starts happening, Richard and Iris share this profound exchange:
Richard: You’re not going to wait for me to drive away so you can go back there?
Iris: Not today.
Richard: I’ll take today.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: If you can get past the contrivances (e.g., Swiss army knife), medium-shallow screenplay (e.g. some rote Grief and Loss subtext) and the too-tidy irony of the situation (Iris thinks she wants to die, but then realizes she doesn’t), you’ll enjoy Don’t Move for its Hitchcock-derived play-the-audience-like-a-piano M.O. Netto and Schindler make some hay from a simple premise, using the slow dispersion and recession of the paralyzing agent as a narrative tool to create and stretch tension, and the result is akin to a Jeremy Saulnier film (see: Green Room or Rebel Ridge) at about 40 percent of the intensity and ambition. Which is just fine, since Saulnier’s goal seems to be maximum squirmage and sphincter-clenchage, and audiences are likely to find Don’t Move to be a few degrees more accessible and digestible.
So yes, Netto and Schindler deploy a big gimmick here, but it’s a pretty good one, as they establish Richard as a cretin getting kicks by exploiting a woman’s emotional vulnerability, and Iris as someone who might need, I don’t know, some perspective, or a lesson in appreciating life? The film’s strongest asset is its methodical pace, the directors using long, drawn-out tilts and pans to generate suspense, pulling the taffy to a breaking point, and exploiting our desire to see Iris gradually regain her ability to, say, generate just enough strength to press the button on the seatbelt latch. Some of Don’t Move is nonsensical and some of it is sensical but overall, it’s just engrossing enough to make us care for the protagonist’s well-being. Note, this isn’t the type of movie that thoroughly embraces The Bleak, although it’s just brave enough to flirt with it to the point where you wonder if Iris has suffered enough, or might suffer more. The film walks the tightrope nicely.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Don’t Move is a little better than just fine. It’s a reasonably tight and effective thriller, and a rock-solid debut from Netto and Schindler.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
