Fear (2023) review.
Fear (2023) slips into theaters this weekend to little fanfare and even less marketing push. Is it an undercover gem waiting to be discovered? I’ll save you the time. No.
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Fear
Directed by Deon Taylor
Written by John Ferry and Deon Taylor
Starring Joseph Sikora, Ruby Modine, Andrew Bachelor, Tipp “T.I.” Harris and Iddo Goldberg
Fear (2023) Review
I didn’t know anything about Fear (2023) before the lights went down in the theater. An hour and a half later I’m not sure that I know any more about it than I did before. It’s a movie that tries to be a lot of things…and doesn’t succeed at any of them.
Fear (2023) has an interesting central idea, at least. A group of friends gather at a remote lodge during the pandemic (yeah…we’re starting to get a lot of these now). The lodge was the site of some bad stuff and now it feeds off people’s fears. More specifically, it turns people’s inner most fears against them and causes them to kill themselves.
There are boundless creative routes that a story can take with this set up. Fear (2023) never lands on one. We are told early on what each character’s greatest fear is. A classic campfire scene where we get to know everyone offers some promise that the movie will have fun with the genre. Unfortunately, by the time the scene is over the script has stripped that hope away. An information dump presents the fears in a completely unmemorable way.
Still…a commitment to playing toward the personal horror’s the characters will endure could have bailed the movie out a little. What we get instead is an unfocused, often confusing, series of scenes that lack the emotional or horrific impact they should. We know little about most of the characters outside of their clumsily stated fears. Even with those fears serving as their main character traits…the moments they are confronted by them lack much impact.
It also strangely turns into a surprisingly religious movie by the end. Outside of one off-hand comment from a character…it’s completely out of nowhere. We’ve seen both good and bad uses of religion in horror. Fear (2023) might be the first time we’ve seen it just tacked on to an ending.
The cast itself does as good a job as can be expected dealing with this mess. Rom (Joseph Sikora) and Bianca (Annie Ilonzeh) serve as our de facto leads in Fear (2023). I say it that way because the movie struggles so much to keep focused on an idea for long enough for anything to be impactful. After wavering between dream sequences, folk mythology, investigative horror, pandemic horror and apparition appearances for over an hour it eventually settles on a kind of survival horror…with Rom and Bianca’s story taking more focus.
It’s hard to hold the cast responsible for any of the problems in the movie. Everyone is working hard to make you care about something the production makes impossible to care about. Ilonzeh does everything she can with what she is given to create a character to root for. That you mostly do is a credit to her performance.
The biggest issue with Fear (2023) is that it simply has no idea what it is. It knows what it’s trying to say…that we shouldn’t let fear influence our decisions or rule our lives. What it doesn’t know is how to say it. I almost want to give it credit for not going the easy A Nightmare on Elm Street knock-off route. But a rip-off would have been more of a direction and choice than Fear (2023) ever actually lands on.
Scare Value
Whatever Fear (2023) is trying to do…it doesn’t work. It’s a mess of unrealized ideas. The central concept is an interesting set up and the cast does what they can…but the scattershot story and unfocused direction undoes them at every turn.
1.5/5
Fear Trailer
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