SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.Near the 35-minute mark, we’re finally made aware of David’s death as he limps towards a window which serves as a frame within the frame, demarcating the relevant members of the party. We see Sophie and company slowly run outside while Bee stands still in shock and stares at the group coalesce around their deceased friend.

This is a moment of alienation, one that further exemplifies her status as an outsider in relation to the group, and she must find a way to broach the gap to gain acceptance in this new setting. Just like she had to do at the film’s start, she must traverse a mirrored world, a window pane that catches her reflection in lieu of a car’s rear-window which obscures her in the background, to enter this newfound devastating domain.

In addition to reinforcing the visual motif of the outsider entering a new space, the positioning of this scene cements us further to Bee’s point-of-view as we’re sure that she is not the murderer.

The lighting in the scene is also particularly evocative, using bright reds to highlight the seemingly murderous presence which now looms the household and covers everyone within its control. Taken together with the neon-light trappings that the characters, primarily Alice, adorn themselves with, there’s certainly a Climax -esque feeling pervading the mise-en-scène even though the two films, which both share some narrative trappings, are worlds apart in intentions.

2. The way the game becomes literal is formally set-up nicely. The game starts with the group together, the lights go out, the group searches through the house, and a male body is found. When the game becomes literal and forces the girls into survival mode, the same order of operations occurs, the only difference being which male is now deceased.

Instead of having control in the first scenario, where the group determines when the lights go out and the deceased can respond back, now the group is forced to play in a seemingly eternal darkness as the storm determines everything and death is now for keeps.

3.Greg’s relationship to this game-turned-reality is nicely done. In the initial game, he’s killed by Jordan, the game’s killer, the poorest of the “in-group” and uses his death as a moment to prank everyone. He only wakes up when David, the only other present male, taps him on the groin area – an intentional choice which reinforces the male dynamism set-up since the start of the film with the sword.

When he’s discovered by the women afterwards, once the game has become reality, he’s sleeping in a bright red room, another inspired lighting choice that reinforces the characters’ descents into hell – a direct contrast to the Eden of the opening. He’s woken up by Alice, his partner, who touches his chest, specifically tapping at his heart – a move towards love.

He wakes up and acts in a joking manner, an evocation of his previous behavior, but now that games rules have disappeared, the rule of law so to speak, his behavior is now coded as threatening and only serves to make him seem deranged and threatening.

He’s executed without even being given a chance to explain himself or get a full bearing on the situation purely because of the recognition of his masculinity, (mis)recognition of his military status, and the awareness of the aforementioned power-play with David.

It’s also no coincidence that his killer is Bee, the female outsider, who is also seeking to find a place in the group and protect her partner, the only one who she feels a valid sense of connection towards.

The entire interaction thus seeks to connect a few of the film’s thematic through lines up to the point:

A – the juxtaposition by which he’s woken up determines the way love operates in relation to the rule of law. When this law was guaranteed, even a “waking” done through gender competition, the tapping of the genitalia, does not break into violence. However, with this guarantee missing, a “waking” done through love cannot sustain itself and breaks into dissaray.

B-Bee’s actions against him, actions predicated on her own love, serve as a perverse counter-point to Alice’s manner of waking him up. Love is a tool of violence when introduced to a social order where rules are then removed because it becomes a manner by which new demarcations within a group are made, boundaries that determine who can be targeted by violence.

Unfortunately, this is the last moment where gender takes center-stage in explaining anything, a disappointing choice given that Max’s presence seems like a ripe way to play around with both the tension within the narrative proper and the themes of gender. We’re left with a more simple message that masculinity has been over-coded as always violent, femininity is just as literally violent – only the women end up doing any murdering – when given the right situations, and that social justice vernacular creates a caricature of the genders that does not serve as well as a heuristic as believed.

4.There’s a nice conversation at the 58-minute mark where the characters hypothesize that Emma actually tripped and fell to her death, something we as the audience know to be fact, but Alice pushes back and believes that someone had to have pushed her. It’s a nice reinforcement of the way the group is their own worst enemy and their projections of issues onto other agents is the whole reason they’re caught up in the mess to begin with.

5. There’s a pretty wonderful nice arcing-shot demonstrating the pandemonium of the situation and the terror of the characters when they initially try to leave the situation in the car at the 36-minute mark. We see the terror in their eyes and the steady shot feels discombobulating given the intensity of what’s happening and its focus on frightened faces.

It’s narratively nice as well because the car refuses to start because of Bee’s earlier use of the mirror which has drained the car’s battery. Her decision to play egoistic performative games has removed the group’s ability to leave the situation.

Unfortunately this is a one-of moment that’s not replicated again throughout the film and the film’s cinematographic decisions, which oscillate between handheld sheets and smaller tracking bursts, aren’t patterned enough to impart a heftier formal weight to the moment.

This points to a larger issue regarding missed opportunities regarding cinematography and form because the initial tracking shots seem to focus on showing the way the opulence of the house overwhelms Bee and then the frenetic hand-held shots demonstrate the chaos unleashed by David’s death and the storm, but no shot choices are repeated with enough intent to ascribe a meaning to these decisions outside of their immediate uses.

6.Disasterpiece scores yet another horror soundtrack out of the park following It Follows. Here the eerie aspects of the score percolate like the rain thrashing the world outside and change in intensity depending on circumstance.

We’re first introduced to the powers of the score when Bee explores the house after David drags away Sophie and it transforms the seemingly docile behaviors of the rest of the party into something to be wary of – we’re aware of the group dynamics at play and know they present terror.

The music then stays in the same vein but gets more intense, aggressive as the girls run to their car in the rain.

Then a more subdued variant, a whisper of the sounds from before, creep into the soundscape when the girls realize they must stay in the house and determine who was really responsible for David’s death.

These three aural modes – normal, intense, subdued – continue to switch depending on the intensity of the moment and are mainly used to build up tension between character encounters, playing primarily in interstitial moments, until all the different narrative strands start to collapse into one another in the last third of the film and the score becomes a more constant force.

7.The themes of the film seem to coalesce into a larger thesis about alienation, the creation of in-groups and out-groups, and we’re presented with multiple vectors that are responsible for this effect: gender and class. However, the film discards these larger systems in favor of focusing on the way personal affections play the biggest role in the way persons are partitioned against one another.

It’s certainly a choice, one that gets straight to the point, but it also misses an opportunity to explore the nuance by which these systems code those emotions to begin with.

A-Class. We know Bee is the poorest person within the party setting, but we learn that Jordan is the poorest among the inner-group and even casts Sophie and David as being wealthy even compared to the others present. However, instead of letting these class distinctions build up and directly affect the way characters of the respective classes act, comments related to the same are treated more like punch-lines by the end of the film.

For example, while Alice’s “upper middle class” comment is funny on its own and reflects her ignorance of what jobs entail what salaries, there’s very little, sans a minor implication, that Jordan’s alienation from the group is predicated on this monetary difference.

It would have been interesting to see Jordan’s fondness for Bee be an effect of both her sexual competition with Sophie and as a kind of move towards class solidarity, but this latter element is just kind of dropped off.

This lack of nuance is most apparent when it comes to Bee who only seems to be acting in relation to her love for Sophie and concern for her own safety, even though the film repeatedly demonstrates that she feels out of place with the opulence on display. We’re even told she’s been struggling to find a new job. Yet, none of this apparently has any impact on the way she acts.

B- Gender. As explained in in the discussion of Greg’s death (Point 3), gender as a system that partitions is largely dropped off even though we know that Max, a potential suspect for the violence, is still at large.

Given the film’s use of terms like “incel” and the evocation of males as dangerous, it’s an odd choice to never develop the the idea of his involvement in a meaningful fashion even as we see women turn on and kill each other. It’s a simplistic resolution to an idea which seems much more promising.

While there’s some implicit work being done given that Max, who was competing with David for Emma’s affections, leaves the situation after a bout of violence instead of staying in the location and ends up living because of it, the point feels woefully underdeveloped especially given that Bee and Sophie survive as well and they do the opposite. There’s not enough to go on to build up to a larger, more compelling idea.

This may be the film’s larger point, that when the rule of law goes out the window, these concerns are largely overshadowed and the manner in which these systems are given power are largely due to the lack of immediate problems which prompts said focus, a kind of critique that takes aim at social justice parlance as a kind of “ivory tower” discourse that doesn’t have bearing when life is bearing down in its immediacy.

However, a secondary casualty of this more myopic view is that it flattens the narrative itself; by removing nuance from the potential thematic overtures that determine the characters, the film also removes nuance in said characters’ decision-making processes, rendering them as more one-dimensional stand-ins, which explains why the latter half of the film becomes less tense and easier to predict.

8.The final few minutes neatly frames the film’s primarily conceit in the darkest comedic fashion. We start with Sophie appearing behind Bee, a move which could have been ripped out of the slasher villain’s playbook in its abruptness. She desperately tries to gain her partner’s affections again but the cat is out of the bag.

This is a counter-point to the opening in Eden where Sophie declared her love and Bee paused. Here Bee responds in full, pointing her gun at her partner and demands to know the truth of the situation. Sophie is forced to deal with the consequences of this response but would rather die than let the image of her experience such a fate.

She tosses her phone into the mud and the two girls begin to wrestle, not for the gun which would give them immediate power but for the phone itself, the ultimate arbiter of one’s persona. The point is exceptionally clear: in this technological age, one’s image is granted an even greater status than one’s life and protecting the former takes precedence. This is a biting, nihilistic conclusion that feels very much in line with the film’s posturing up to the point.

Then the two jump into the dirty water, the self-contained womb that tried to approximate nature is rendered muddy and disgusting by this same force. It’s also fitting that these two characters, the only ones who didn’t take the plunge (along with Max) at the film’s start, are the only survivors of the entire debacle – a nasty pay-off to neat foreshadowing. They go through a “dirty” baptism that reveals who they really are and not who they want to be.

It’s appropriate then that as soon as they get out of the pool, they’re shown the “truth” of the situation; the absurdity is revealed for what it is. David’s body unlocks his phone, his visage having power even after death, a capitulation of the film’s message about the importance of one’s persona, and then we see that his demise was a result of his own stupid competitive drive, a dick measuring contest gone horribly wrong.

Sophie and Bee’s shocked faces are fitting reactions to the film’s ultimate punch-line: all the deaths could have been avoided if the party’s members weren’t such miserable persons focused on only their own egos.

It’s at this point that the logic of alienation takes a new step as Max, the missing member of the initial group, comes back to the location and realizes that everything has gone to hell in a handbasket. He’s the outsider now in this upturned world and knows nothing.

The two girls are completely unable to explain the situation in any meaningful situation. Their only recourse is the ultimate mic-drop, an enunciation that says nothing but also everything at once: “I have reception.”