Please give it a chance.

Rating: 10/10 (14 February 2020)

I remember seeing promos for this. I forgot them as soon as I saw them.
Then I saw it was playing on television and I literally watched to see some nudity because I knew that much about the movie.
So committed to watching for 10 minutes. Then I watched another 10. And another.
I couldn't have torn myself away even if so often I wanted to look away.
I thought it would be another trashy mess, I really did. But what I got was a slow burning narrative of youths "so far from home" whose slight sense of dread grows and grows until it ignites in a terrifying bacchanal of evil.
All they wanted was to have some fun but eventually it becomes apparent that playtime is over, at least for them. The film has a hypnotic pacing an visual style. Not giving up the good for quite a while.
With so many people smugly parading generic schlock as "superior horror" just because it didn't have a drop of blood, I like to remember this movie and think, it's not about the viscera: they intrigued me, they told me a story, they created characters I cared about by giving them depth and insecurities. There's a key scene where the protagonist talks about an experience in his childhood some viewers felt was just shoehorned in. But to me it made him more like a person. He felt like someone I could have known and it justified his motivations later.
The final act of this had me on the edge of my seat. It doesn't let off for a moment. Usually a good movie is unpredictable. This movie managed to let me guess what was coming and still be terrified: ("no, no, no don't do it! Please!" I said).
On one level a story of our capacity for empathy but that's shortchanging it. This is a nihilistic depiction of one person's vicious experience.
There's even one laugh out loud moment. It totally works in context, you'll know it when you see it.
I know a lot of people want you think this is just schlock and splatter. But this is something special. This is among the greatest horror movies of all time and it delivers in every respect.