Don’t Move review.
Don’t Move stretches its premise as far as it can go…but it does so surprisingly well.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Don’t Move
Directed by Brian Netto and Adam Schindler
Screenplay by T.J. Cimfel and David White
Starring Kelsey Asbille and Finn Wittrock
Don’t Move Review
There’s nothing more powerful in horror than a final girl. You know it. I know it. Even the film’s antagonist knows it. Or, at least, they find out the hard way. While most movies choose to lean into the tropes of the powerful survivor girl…some attempt to create new obstacles for their protagonists to overcome. The hope is that, stripped of some of their abilities, more suspenseful stories can be built around them. We’ve recently seen not one, but two horror movies that feature blind (or mostly blind) protagonists. Mike Flanagan’s Hush presented a final girl who was both deaf and mute. Don’t Move has a new twist on the concept in mind. Its final girl can’t move a muscle.
Iris (Kelsey Asbille) is a grieving mother. We meet her contemplating suicide at the same spot her young son fell to his death. She’s talked down by a charming stranger named Richard (Finn Wittrock). Before she can figure out how to keep moving forward…Richard takes her captive. She manages to break free but is about to have a bigger problem. Richard has injected her with a paralytic agent. In the next 20 minutes she won’t be able to move.
You may have guessed that Don’t Move isn’t exactly brimming with action. Iris runs into the woods and eventually escapes by letting a stream carry her away. From that point on…she’s not going anywhere. At least…not on her own. Iris is incapable of movement…or even speech. And Richard is looking for her.
Multiple ticking clocks are introduced in Don’t Move. 20 minutes until the serum takes hold. A few hours until Richard’s family joins him at the family cabin. And, of course, an undetermined amount of time until Iris is able to regain control. Control of her body…and of the situation. Don’t Move isn’t looking to reinvent the horror rules. It’s looking to play with them and create uniquely suspenseful moments. We know how this story ends 99 times out of 100. Maybe all 100 times. You don’t go to the trouble of handicapping your protagonist to this extent without delivering on cathartic expectations in the end.
What makes Don’t Move work, among other things, is that the concept is genuinely fresh. We’ve seen dozens of killers chase dozens of women through dozens of woods. We’ve never seen someone try to survive with this much working against them. It opens the door to fresh takes on the old cat and mouse story. While there are limitations on how many variations of those takes there are…Don’t Move manages to draw consistent suspense from them.
It also means that Kelsey Asbille had a monstrous performance challenge. Without speech or movement for a majority of Don’t Move…Asbille is left to act a lot with her eyes. I should say…a lot of effective acting with her eyes. Whether laying in a field while a riding lawnmower rumbles nearby or in the passenger seat of Richard’s truck unable to alert the passersby…Asbille makes you feel Iris’s fear.
Finn Wittrock has his full range of motion…and a gift to convincingly lie to everyone he comes across. Richard’s ability to weave lines of the truth with utter bullshit is impressive. He has an answer for everyone he encounters. Made up stories about the woman he’s looking for and why she might be immobile. Fictional accounts of the car accident Iris caused before she lost control of her body. There’s no situation that he can’t solve with a smile and a lie. Wittrock is convincingly psychotic. I mean that as a compliment.
Despite Iris’s immobility, Don’t Move proceeds at a surprisingly rapid pace. As mentioned, there is a limit to what can be done with the concept. They get everything they can out of it. In a story where wiggling your finger is a win…the small victories begin to pile up. After a point…the clock is ticking on Richard too. He needs to find and kill Iris before she regains her strength and before his unwitting family arrives. Don’t Move gets everything it can out of that too.
Given the limitations of Iris’s condition, Don’t Move is a wildly successful attempt at executing a unique concept. There’s a ceiling on how entertaining a movie like this can be…and Don’t Move finds it more often than not. It’s not big, loud or action packed. In lesser hands it would feel gimmicky and fall apart. Thanks to a full exploration of a fresh idea and the performances of its two leads…Don’t Move never does.
Scare Value
Netflix’s Don’t Move gives us a new kind of protagonist. Iris, literally, can’t move for most of the movie. The unique concept opens up new moments of suspense within a familiar story. Final girls have become so powerful in genre film that the movies are finding new ways to handicap them. It’s hard to imagine taking it much further than Don’t Move does. Fighting for survival while unable to fight back is a heck of a twist on a classic.
3/5
Don’t Move Link
Streaming on Netflix
