Don’t Move Review: Netflix Thriller Is Terrible

It’s important for movies to ask serious questions. Brian Netto and Adam Schindler’s new Netflix thriller “Don’t Move” asks a very, very important question: What if a scene that lasted just a few minutes in another movie became the entire movie?

“Don’t Move” is a good attempt at tackling themes of mortality and depression, but it’s above all a formal exercise in filmmaking. In short, in the movie, Kelsey Asbille (“Yellowstone”) plays Iris, a mother mourning the accidental death of her son. At the beginning of the movie, he almost kills himself on a hiking trail. She is interrupted by Richard, played by Finn Wittrock (“Origin”), who snaps her out of the situation and helps her remember that “Broken does not mean hopeless.”

Later, when Iris finally rediscovers her will to live, Richard tasers her, ties her up, and throws her into his backseat. It is revealed that Richard is a serial killer, and to make Iris’ day worse, he drugged her with a mixture that would soon paralyze her for an hour. Now he must find a way to save himself without moving.

Thrillers about being drugged and running out of options can take many forms, from the manic fun of Neveldine/Taylor’s “Crank” to the nihilistic despair of Rudolph Maté’s “DOA.” With “Don’t Move,” Netto and Schindler have done their job. You can make it even harder by reversing the time clock: Iris won’t die when time runs out, she will actually be able to fight back. So the problem is not how to stop the clock, but how to survive until the alarm goes off.

To make this little trick work, “Don’t Move” uses impeccable cinematography from Zach Kuperstein (“The Barbarian”), who uses the serenity to its advantage with stressful close-ups and point-of-view shots. Kelsey Asbille also proves that she can rise to the challenge of film as she conveys a multitude of emotions and problem-solving thought processes with very few tools at her disposal.

But more than anything, “Don’t Move” relies on the ingenuity of its writers to find a way to turn a scene in which the protagonist is drugged (mostly an excuse for a time jump and location change) into an engine. Run for 90 minutes. And I can definitely say that they have partially achieved this.

Comprised of a series of set pieces, “Don’t Move” finds a chilling balance between Iris contemplating her escape from problems and her desperate reliance on the whims of cruel fate. An old monk named William (Moray Treadwell) nearly runs him over with his lawnmower, which he has no control over, but when William tries to communicate with him all he can do is wink. And boy, does it have a lot to explain with just a few winks. She needs to communicate clearly with a man who is unwilling or unable to help her, especially when Richard calls her. This entire sequence is pure Hitchcockian delight; a bomb that could explode at any moment if plans go awry or life turns into chaos.

The problem is that in order to get to these intriguing centerpieces, Richard has to make some of the stupidest decisions in the history of serial murder. Once Iris is strapped into her backseat, she is able to cut her restraints using a Swiss Army Knife; he has it because – as Richard admits – he seems to have forgotten to look for his victim today.

That’s how he was able to get out of his car and into a situation where he could theoretically survive the encounter. And since Iris has to keep an eye on the time throughout the movie, Richard decides to leave her iWatch as well, since there’s no cell phone reception in the mountains. Even though the mountains are full of residences with wifi. They also pass by gas stations. Anyway, it’s a risk he’s willing to take. This is after all path It is very difficult to remove the watch.

Richard is basically the villain from “The Vanishing” if he gets extremely lazy. He’s also terrible at talking his way out of random encounters. He’s trying to get across the same old misogynist bullshit that Iris is his wife and that he’s mentally unstable and/or an alcoholic, which is why he’s acting weird and why you shouldn’t read anything into how scared and injured he looks, Richard is a man and he’s totally into it . But he has no talent for improvisation.

Finn Wittrock makes the most of his own character’s limitations, but unlike Iris, Richard’s problems aren’t there to be cleverly resolved. They exist to be exploited by Iris. So Richard does smart things in service of the plot, and equally makes stupid choices in service of the plot. Wittrock does a good job of making Richard seem like the kind of villain who can charm his life and make him look bad when he doesn’t have a paralyzed victim in his car, but how did he manage to get so far away with these murders? Length is the film’s biggest mystery.

Again, “Don’t Move” is a genre exercise. It’s an experiment to see if this single element of a serial killer story can be successfully expanded into an entire movie. And the thing about experiments is that they don’t have to be completely successful to be worth doing. Brian Netto and Adam Schindler’s nail-biting trick is intense and creative enough to get your heart pounding and make you wonder if you’re smart enough to survive the same situation. If you like thrillers, it’s a great time.

But the film’s greatest value is that it is an exploration of the details of filmmaking, a serious attempt to make something new by changing the perspective on something old. If this gives future filmmakers new and bright ideas, it will all be worth it. And if those same filmmakers also learn what not to do along the way (like not making a fool of your villain because it just greases the wheels of the script), so much the better.

“Don’t Move” is now streaming on Netflix.