Initially premiering way back in 2011, You’re Next has finally gotten a wide release in North America and is the latest in a long line of small budget slasher flicks to show up and recede quietly from movie theatres. The problem may be that an audience for a movie like You’re Next may simply not really exist. As recent hit “The Conjuring” and the continued success of the Paranormal Activity movies has proven, there’s still a lot of money to be made in horror movies but the slasher film is a small niche whose popularity has definitely waned in recent years. The long-anticipated Scream 4 came out two years ago failing to make much of a wave with horror fans or in the general box office and it has become quite clear that fan tastes have shifted to the more creepily subtle paranormal fare lately.
As is usually the case with slasher movies, You’re Next’s plot is virtually non-existent but it serves the purposes of the film; no commentary on society or meditative insight on the nature of violence will be found anywhere near here. The Davisons, an upper class family of rich annoying people who we are sure to not really care about are the designated targets this time around. Deciding to retire in their isolated country home in the middle of nowhere, a gathering of the various children and their significant others for their parents’ anniversary sets the stage for the mayhem that will most undoubtedly ensue. All of this has been done to death of course and there’s nothing really new here, especially for those familiar with all the clichéd horror movie tropes, but the film is competently made, expertly crafted, and the cast of unknowns does a serviceable job for the most part. Our heroine is Australian actress Sharni Vinson as Erin, girlfriend of one of the retired couple’s visiting children and definitely the most likable member of the cast. Continually proving to be harder to kill than anyone could have anticipated, she plays the role completely straight for the most part and just goes straight down into business. No funny one-liners or physical comedy a la Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead is to be found here. That being said, Vinson plays the role well as she fights back with a combination of creative little traps and sheer force of resilient brutal will.
Well-polished and competently made with a number of stand-out scenes and sequences, You’re Next still definitely falls into the category of hit and miss horror. The action is never too outrageous and the characters’ decisions are never too unbelievable or ludicrous which is a welcome change to be sure but the last third changes all that. Cued by a fast paced track that sounds like it belongs in one of the horror classics of the 80s, everything detours into a very different direction in the final act as the number of survivors begins to dwindle and the deaths start to become more creative. You almost wish this was more like those crazy over-the-top gorefests of the 80s but the tonal shift is done half-heartedly and comes out of nowhere. Caught between being a serious type of slasher film and being a self-parody in the style of the Scream series, it all comes off muddled and unsatisfying. Put simply, You’re Next is not entirely sure what kind of horror movie it’s trying to be. No mistake here, it definitely aims to please its audience, and for horror fans there’s much to like about this slasher flick but the shame of the matter is that the movie is just tonally all over the place. Figuring out who the killers could be is part of the silly fun of these movies and while the reveal isn’t particularly interesting here, it works rather well as we watch the characters get picked off one by one for reasons unknown. But You’re Next ultimately takes itself too seriously for its own good and the film’s occasional foray into funny territory comes off odd and jarring; it just doesn’t really belong in a movie that had made no real attempts to establish itself as such a film in the first hour or so.
Not as fun or entertaining as it wants to be or could have been and not as intense or terrifying as it should be, You’re Next gets the job done for the most part but fails to be memorable or particularly interesting, placing it firmly in the category of a late night horror movie guilty pleasure on Netflix and nothing more.
C
Trailer:
Movie info:
Runtime: 94 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Cast: Sharni Vinson, AJ Bowen, Nicholas Tucci
Director: Adam Wingard
Screenplay: Simon Barrett
Cinematography: Andrew D. Palermo
Distributed by: Lionsgate
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