Reader, I will be blunt: I acutely disliked this movie. It is a home invasion thriller released in the same summer as the conceptually dire The Purge that very nearly succeeds in making The Purge look good in comparison; really, the only thing You're Next gets right that The Purge gets wrong is that Wingard's film boasts a lead performance by Australian actor Sharni Vinson as its Final Girl that is absolutely the best possible iteration of that stock character that this scenario could ever in a hundred years have produced. In a just world, Vinson (whose biggest film, by a massive degree, has been Step Up 3D) will, with this film's release, end up on the radar of casting directors, who will pluck her from the world of crappy low-fi indies and make a great star of her. But the world where Vinson ends up wildly imbalancing You're Next by giving an actual, great performance amongst such an assortment of graceless microbudget indie celebrities (no fewer than four members of a cast of 16 souls are directors) is not a just one.
The film opens with a scene that, for a good while, seems to be just one of those "fuck it, let's start with a murder" gestures that plague slasher films: a gorgeous young woman without any shirt on and a pudgy man with poor facial hair grooming skills (men with questionably grooming paired with women they don't deserve is a pervasive quality of You're Next, though the unexamined sexism of these new indie horror movies is pretty well-established at this point) have just wrapped up a bout of sex that he evidently enjoys more than she did - the opening shot is accompanied by sound design that's deliberately muddying the noise of orgasm with the noise of violent pain - when they are caught out by a man in a fox mask (Lane Hughes), who kills the woman and uses her blood to paint "you're next on the window when the man wanders in unawares. Quicker than you can say "shock cut", we find ourselves in the company of Erin (Vinson), and her boyfriend Crispian (AJ Bowen), traveling to the deep country to visit his defense contractor dad (Rob Moran) - the political implications are raised just long enough to be completely ignored - and homemaker mom (Barbara Crampton, the film's requisite '80s horror movie star) on the event of the their 35th anniversary.
It's quite a full house that they're headed to, in fact, by the time the anniversary starts up, Crispian's siblings Drake (important indie director Joe Swanberg), Aimee (important indie director Amy Seimetz), and Felix (Nicholas Tucci), and their respective significant others Kelly (Margaret Laney, hiding under the name Sarah Myers), Tariq (important indie horror director Ti West), and Zee (Wendy Glenn) will all have shown up, to fail almost immediately at the simple task of not having a screaming match when they're all gathered around the dinner table, and befitting the preponderance of "mumbly human dramas" veterans in the cast, it's not that much of a surprise that this ends up being very much the best-played, most cleverly played scene in the film).
Dinner is abruptly interrupted when Tariq notices movement, and, hoping to get the hell away from the fighting going on, heads to the window to see closer. For his troubles, he ends up with a crossbow bolt to the brain, and the nine remaining attendees of this officially unsuccessful dinner party are dumbstruck into terror by the fox mask man and his colleagues, one wearing a lamb mask (L.C. Holt), one wearing a tiger mask (You're Next writer and important indie producer Simon Barrett).
You're Next continues in a familiar mode from here on out: you might even say, a conspicuously familiar mode: bodies pile up at a truly amazing clip, as people do the absolute dumbest things you could possibly do in their place. While it may well be that Windgard and Barrett are deliberately making a stupid film to poke fun at other stupid films, there comes a point where the difference between bad-on-purpose and just-plain-bad is wholly academic; the point remains that we have a home invasion slasher movie that is full of idiotic behavior by poorly-conceived characters given atrocious lines of dialogue to say, embodied by an almost uniformly terrible cast (Moran is the worst, in a tight race; despite my intense antipathy for Swanberg as a human being, I have to concede that his smug dick portrayal of Drake - a smug dick name if ever I head one - is maybe the second-best piece of acting in the film. Though the gap between 1st and 2nd is larger than the gap between 2nd and last, in this place).
Wingard's aesthetic - either because he doesn't respect the material, or because he's just not that talented (his later work on the tedious anthology film V/H/S suggests a strong possibility it's the latter) - tends to make the action far less enjoyable than it ought to be, as the film fails to differentiate tonally between any pair of scenes once the action starts, and the bodies start to pile up like firewood, mechanistically and dully. Let us say that I am grateful that You're Next kills off its cast at such a speedy pace mostly because it picks up an inertia that the sausage-making approach Wingard takes to his second act sorely needs. Meanwhile, the director and his crew employ that bog-standard low-fi thing that American independent films tend to wallow in, as though being ugly and rough were a source of pride rather than a limitation (though at least You're Next has really great sound recording, my customary bête noire in these things), and while this lends the film a grubby authenticity - and the ubiquitous handheld camera does serve, in places, to make things seem hectic and terrifying - the guttural crudeness of the filmmaking really isn't a substitute for atmosphere, mood, or any kind of visual appeal to speak of. Griminess is become it's own cliché at this point.
By the time the movie devolves into its protracted Final Girl sequence, spiked by one twist that the movie more or less expects us to get ahead of, and one that it apparently doesn't, though a genre-savvy viewer shouldn't have too hard of a time predicting it, it's so divorced from character continuity or story logic that the amount of low-key observational energy that went into establishing the characters in the first act seems even more wasted than it did when it was happening. It's a film about terrible things happening to deeply uninteresting people, making absolutely no claims on the viewer's emotions or engagement, only our ability to feel superior. There are clearly people who love this kind of thing, to judge from the film's warm word of mouth, and I do not blame them - to paraphrase Roger Ebert, I love horror films too much to want anybody to have a bad time at one. But I also love them too much to stand the rank cynicism of You're Next, a film hellbent on being everything but good, sincere horror. Pass.
3/10
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