DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE

Rating: 3/10 (24 March 2019)

The film is too much brain and too little brawn, meaning it lacks the guts to go where it promises. Making a horror film is no easy task and Peele in this case is simply out of his league. Once it becomes apparent every member of the family will survive the night of reckoning, any terror is drained from the story and it becomes reliant on the same old tricks, tropes, and gags of the genre in trying to pull off the impossible - a story attempting to be at the same time, comic and serious and macabre, but ultimately way too high in concept. To the film's further detriment, Peele feels the need to explain it all at a point in the film when anybody still watching is probably straining to care anymore. As well, he steals a number of ideas from Haneke's FUNNY GAMES, then fails to frame them with any punch or savagery. That at least might have helped his audience begin to struggle with the universality of his notions of us vs. them. Isn't that, as he has stated, the purpose of the film?