Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jeffrey Reddick
Starring: Kourtney Bell, Bryan Batt, Will Stout, Skyler Hart, Jeremy Holm,
Jaqueline Fleming
As the creator of the
Final Destination
series, screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick has guaranteed himself an
entry in any future horror encyclopaedias. What a great and fresh concept
Reddick came up with at a time when Hollywood was still churning out
uninspired Scream knockoffs. Broken down,
Final Destination is essentially a slasher movie, but the
genius of Reddick was to make death itself the villain. In each entry in
the series, a group of survivors of some over-the-top accident (usually
rendered in a thrilling set-piece, none better than the highway sequence
that sets up Final Destination 2) find that they can't escape their fate, as death catches up with them
one by one through clever Rube Goldberg-esque sequences that transform
previously ambivalent surroundings into deathtraps. Its simplicity is a
thing of beauty. God I love it!
As you can imagine, I was excited for Reddick's directorial debut,
Don't Look Back, an expansion of a short he made a few years back, as it follows a
similar format to the script that made his name. Once again we have a
group of strangers drawn together by a horrific incident, and once again
they perish one by one in seemingly inexplicable fashion.
Here, the strangers are bonded not by surviving some disaster but rather
by witnessing a horrific act and failing to intervene. Nine months after a
home invasion that resulted in her father being shot dead and herself
clinically dying for three minutes before being revived, Caitlin Kramer
(Kourtney Bell) has plucked up enough courage to finally leave her
house and go for a jog in the local park. There she sees a man, whom we
later learn is Douglas Helton (Dean J. West), being brutally beaten
by another man. Her agoraphobia kicking in, Caitlin remains rooted to the
spot. Other bystanders have no such excuses, yet they fail to intervene,
with one man even recording the incident on his phone.
What follows is essentially a retread of the
Final Destination template, as the witnesses succumb to
death one by one. The key difference here is that we aren't treated to any
outlandish or cleverly constructed set-pieces. Rather most of the deaths
occur offscreen, with Caitlin arriving on the scene just in time to find
their fresh corpses, like a millennial Jessica Fletcher.
Remove Final Destination's Grand Guignol flourishes and you would be left with a rather
uninvolving mystery with the occasional bit of metaphysical philosophising
thrown in. That's pretty much what you get here.
Don't Look Back is a curiously chaste film, as though
Reddick set out to make a horror movie guaranteed not to offend your
churchgoing grandmother.
Churches figure heavily here. Most American supernatural horror movies
involve a degree of Christianity, but it's usually within a white Catholic
milieu. Don't Look Back takes place against a black
Protestant backdrop, and while this makes for a refreshing change (it
might be the first such horror movie since William Girdler's
Abby back in 1974), with its literary nature, Protestantism
doesn't translate to the screen with the same impact as Catholicism, that
most visual of Christian sects. Where Catholicism likes to show,
Protestantism prefers to tell, and that doesn't make for good
cinema.
Don't Look Back has the bones of a decent horror movie. It
suffers from Reddick's inexperience behind the camera, with some film
school freshman mistakes on display like eyelines failing to match, but he
does throw in the occasional clever flourish, like a bird's eye view of
candles ominously blowing out during a night time vigil. Bell is the
film's one revelation, and her spirited performance goes a long way
towards keeping us onboard with a movie that plays a little too close to a
second rate Lifetime thriller. With a seasoned director at the helm and
some satisfying set-pieces, Don't Look Back could easily
have made for an entertaining throwback to turn of the century popcorn
horror. As it is, it's both literally and metaphorically bloodless.
Don't Look Back is on UK DVD and
Digital from June 14th.