In short: Better Watch Out (2016)

Ashley (Olivia DeJonge) spends one of her last nights before she and her parents will be moving from a small town to a bigger city babysitting thirteen-year old Luke (Levi Miller), as she has done for years. That Luke has a big fat – and surprisingly creepy – crush on her will turn out to be the least of her problems when mysterious bad guys do the home invasion thing. Not even to mention what’s actually going on.

I know, I’m supposed to like this Christmas-set sort of home invasion movie by Chris Peckover a whole bunch – the Internet tells me so – but while I certainly see the technical abilities of everyone involved, actually watching the film, I found myself confronted with just another twist-heavy horror thriller. Which is okay, I guess, but like a lot of twist-heavy films, Better Watch Out does give the impression of a particularly needy performing monkey who permanently needs to hop up and down in front of its viewer’s face to tell him it is indeed a twist-heavy thriller – with twists! It also seems very important for the film to remind the viewer how clever it is every five minutes or so; not that I ever felt much need to be impressed by the cleverness on display, the film was already smug enough about it all on its own. And, well, it is “cleverness” but never intelligence: everything anyone says or does is in service of the film being “clever” and twisty, but only seldom makes sense for the characters; and if you’re looking for motivations beyond “the bad guys are crazy”, you’re plain out of luck. Ironically enough, if the film weren’t quite as pushy about making quite, quite sure I realize how clever it is, I might actually have enjoyed it anyway. It is after all well acted – particularly by DeJonge and Levi Miller – and looks rather slick, but it’s so empty (unless you count the usual vague pseudo-satirical gestures towards suburbia as depth) yet so self-satisfied, I mostly found myself annoyed by it.