Jared Mobarak

It’s empty horror barely skating by on recognizable IP.

The only way this play at “bringing a sense of joy and optimism during a time of great fear and loss” (as she states in her brief, platitude-heavy, 68-word director’s statement) could be more tone-deaf is if she waited to reveal it was set during the first few weeks of the pandemic in 2020 for a third-act rug pull.

Gossling populates this little town with so many horrible people that you assume the tornadoes are coming to purge them from society. It’s therefore somewhat jarring when she lets impending tragedy provide them redemption instead.

Rather than showcase itself as a psychological puzzle, we’re left stumbling through a predictable shell game.

The thing about withholding plot information is that you must generally divulge that which you’ve held back at some point. To simply ignore that your audience is in the dark as far as the big picture is concerned is a sure-fire way to lose interest.

I’m sure Allen apologists will say that A Rainy Day in New York was built as a way of self-ridicule with Gatsby’s incredulity towards women always finding older men attractive and filmmakers preying upon ingénues, but nothing in the text suggests that it is.

Eventually you can’t help but unironically wonder if Sud intended to make a comedy because the mood swings and incredulity only become more and more unbelievable.

It becomes your basic genre thriller as a result with a straightforward race against the clock to escape before the time arrives for Christine to be sacrificed. But the script is anything but basic in that goal. On the contrary, Margolis, Morley, and Tish make it so convoluted that I wasn’t sure where relevance began and deflection ended.

These two couples are literally here to be targets and are thus more frustrating than not whenever they unsurprisingly escape the multiple harrowing moments of homicidal fun.

It’s a shame because McDermott effectively toes the line between dorky and menacing (before the film explains which is real), Plummer is great playing with a loaded deck of anxieties and insecurities, and Beaty performs her role perfectly until the writing abandons what made her necessary.

I need to therefore believe Judy Greer selected it as her directorial debut because she thought she could somehow infuse a little satire and approach highlighting examples of masculine vulnerability — a goal that was sadly not achieved.

What should be tender and whimsical feels repetitive and off-putting.

Thankfully the performances try to elevate the plot since each character seems catered to the actor cast.

While the execution of every weak excuse for a twist and turn is really the culprit behind Looking Glass‘ failure, I would be remiss to not point a finger at Cage too.

If we’re not supposed to pity Dahmer while watching the unfortunate progression of his sad life, why are we watching? Is it to reinforce the notion that he was always a monster? Or is it to forgive Derf (Alex Wolff) and his buds for assisting in his descent? In the end it really doesn’t matter because we don’t buy any of it.

It’s one thing if The Dark Below sought campy implausibility, but it craves legitimacy instead.