By Gabby Grosbety, Staff Editor
By this past fall, I was beginning to give up on the Blumhouse film production company—between Cam (2018), Split (2017), and You Should Have Left (2020), I was thinking that maybe it should have been me leaving. Some of their narratives may have been inconclusively supernatural and a tad ridiculous for my tastes, but I decided to give them another chance when they came out with four installments just in time for spooky season in October: The Lie, Black Box, Evil Eye, and Nocturne, all part of a series titled “Welcome to the Blumhouse.” I had appreciated some of their past projects, especially Get Out (2017), The Invisible Man (2020), and Happy Death Day (2017), and also love how imaginative and gripping the thriller genre can be. And overall, I was not disappointed; I found this to be a strong collection, with Black Box and Evil Eye being particular standouts. Below you can find my more comprehensive thoughts on each installment in the order that I watched them.
The Lie (3.5/5 Stars)
The Lie, starring Joey King as ballet dancer Kayla, ventures into a stark world of blinding whites and muted grays that keep you on the edge of your seat from the very first shot. This absence of colors populates the wintry atmosphere as Kayla and her father (Peter Sarsgaard) are driving to a ballet retreat when they come across Kayla’s friend and fellow ballet dancer, Brittany (Devery Jacobs), who is waiting for a bus to the same place. Kayla offers her a ride, but regrets it when Brittany makes increasingly suggestive comments toward her father. The tension momentarily subsides, though, and is replaced when Brittany abruptly asks Kayla’s father to stop the car in the middle of nowhere to go to the bathroom. We can feel this new tension building; our world of safety begins to fall away when Brittany gets out of the car in an unfamiliar, desolate place. She then begs Kayla to come with her out into the woods. Kayla eventually agrees, with some reluctance.
Time starts ticking; we can feel in the quickening of our heartbeats that we won’t get rest until we find out what’s behind the girls’ uncertain, ominous feeling whereabouts. Kayla’s dad has the same inclinations as us and goes out to look for them, but finds only Kayla, sitting and shivering on a tall bridge, the rushing water below deafening our senses. He learns that Kayla has pushed Brittany to her death after an argument, some of which may have been brought on by Brittany’s behavior in the car. We can now feel our thrumming hearts fall from our chests to the depths of our feet. From there, the movie comes alive with shadows lingering in doorways, fathers seeking answers, and Kayla’s parents stuck in the ultimate moral bind with what lengths they will go to in order to protect their daughter from her unforeseeable fate of committing a criminal act.
For most of the movie, I was intrigued and drawn in by each turn of the plot that flashed before my eyes with an alertness of consciousness and complexity that made me question what I would do if I were in such a predicament as Kayla’s parents: between the love and protection they want to give their child, and their duty as citizens to turn their child in. However, the end deeply disappointed me, hence why I knocked off a star and a half, as it invalidated some of the experience that kept me invested in the movie to begin with. The ending also felt progressively unrealistic as I began to believe the perilous decisions the characters made less and less. However, if you’re looking for an entertaining flick to while the day away and keep you afloat in an escapism apart from this world, this one has you set!
Black Box (4.5/5 Stars)
Black Box follows the narrative of a man named Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) who loses his wife and memory, after almost dying himself, in a car accident. He awakens by what feels like a medical miracle to a wise-beyond-her-years young daughter named Ava, who almost summons him to remember, by force of habit, their special handshake. However, he lives fragments of his former life, memory sometimes hungrily consuming him and other times evading him with a frustrating level of elusiveness. Seeking to regain his memory and re-inhabit his previous consciousness, he undergoes an experimental treatment. The treatment pulls him into a hypnosis that stimulates his senses and mind, willing his experiences to come back to him with a clarity he can’t yet quite grasp. Black Box’s visual sequences jar the audience, thrusting them into the unfathomable murkiness of Nolan’s ambiguous world, plunged in darkness. The twists and turns that this movie took fully immersed me in what it means to be human, lose sense of truth, and go through a trauma that intensely affects your soul, mind, and being. Nolan’s journey can’t be missed.
Evil Eye (4/5 Stars)
Evil Eye gets off to a rattling start following a superstitious Indian mother, Usha (Sarita Choudhury), who endures horrific abuse at the hands of her partner, and then flashes forward to the life of her daughter Pallavi (Sunita Mani) in America and her journey towards finding love. Both events progressively come to be interconnected as the mother begins to suspect ill of her daughter’s new, too-perfect boyfriend, Sandeep (Omar Maskati). Sandeep is almost overly courteous and willing to drop everything on a dime for Pallavi, moving quicker than light to marry her. However, he may just have a shady past that connects him to Usha and threatens to upend the seamless, seductive façade he wears with casual confidence. I loved the premise of this movie, but had to take away a star because it felt like all the action rushed to a culmination at the end. But other than that, this film explored how superstition and truth can dangerously intermingle and result in catastrophe as the past wreaks havoc on the present.
Nocturne (3/5 Stars)
A nocturne is defined as a musical composition, usually romantic or dream-like in nature, that encapsulates qualities of the night. This story appropriately feels like a haunted dream that has a demonic gloom to it. As all the characters come undone in some fundamentally charged way, the punctuating rhythms of the piano pieces underscore the dramatic nature of this undoing.
Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) lives in the shadow of her fraternal twin sister Vivian (Madison Iseman) and yearns to be something greater than her talents and successes. Especially given the fact that she gave up her life to piano in exchange for normal teenage experiences, like her first kiss and going out to have fun. This story is underset by this theme of sacrifice and the intensity of feuding female relationships. A classmate and standout musical prodigy’s death intensifies everything as Juliet finds the talent’s journal and begins to step out of the shadow of her twin in a way that feels dangerously possessed.
However much I loved the idea of the plot, as I felt it was in the same determined, darkly elegant vein as Black Swan (2010), this feeling stumbled in terms of my lack of connection to the characters. All of them felt far removed and otherworldly in their malevolence and thought processes. I wanted to sympathize with and understand them, but couldn’t as wholly as I would’ve wanted. I did appreciate, however, this movie’s vision and twisted skewing of reality and narrative. It was a kind of skewing that made me deeply question if what I saw actually happened as it was there and then gone, almost as if playing a game with me, with a fictive journey of imagination overtaking the sane and rational.
Image credit: IMDb
