In short: Rattlesnake (2019)

Driving away from never too clearly defined troubles towards her mother’s home, Katrina Ridgeway (Carmen Ejogo in a fine portrait of the kind of desperation that leads to terrible acts) and her little daughter Clara (Apollonia Pratt) make their way through the great state of Texas. Pausing in the desert, Clara is bitten by a rattlesnake. Very suddenly, a trailer seems to appear nearby, inhabited by a somewhat creepy woman (Debrianna Mansini) who apparently knows her way around rattlesnake bites. In her panic, Katrina doesn’t really register something the woman says about discussing payment later, and since she disappears more or less into thin air, as does Clara’s snakebite, surely, there’s nothing to be concerned about here at all.

Well, our heroine will soon enough learn that she has made an implicit pact with some kind of nasty supernatural power, and that she has only until sundown to deliver a soul for its saving of a soul to it. A bit of research suggests that this sort of thing happens rather often in the area, small as the desert town she ends up in is, but that’s not exactly helping her any; nor does the supernatural power appearing in the form of its former victims to mock her.

So eventually, Katrina decides to go through with the murder asked of her. On the plus side, she does encounter the kind of guy (Theo Rossi) even someone with a conscience might find rather easier to kill in cold blood than others.

I found myself pleasantly surprised by this Netflix production directed by Zak Hilditch. Sure, it’s a bit of a longer Twilight Zone episode with a somewhat harder edge of a very late 2010s kind of desperation, but to my mind, there’s nothing at all wrong with that. Particularly not since Hilditch has the plot well under control, never adding too many contrived additional hoops for Katrina to jump through yet still increasing the stakes and the suspense of the situation continuously. The script is also not quite as straightforward as it seems. So for example Rossi’s Billy is indeed a despicable human being, yet the film still plays him as a human being, not simply absolving Katrina nor cheering her on, despite clearly being on her side, and finding Billy pretty vile; one can’t help but think the supernatural force really trades two souls for the one it saves here.


The film also handles the supernatural elements of the film well, not falling into the trap of wanting to explain the whys and wherefores of the situation, just setting it up, suggesting a few things about it, and letting a viewer’s imagination do the rest of the work. There are a couple of really interestingly strange moments here too, scenes where Katrina interacts with supposedly normal people that are staged in a way that makes them feel just slightly off, as if she (and we the audience) were just one step away from reaching outside of the world we know, but never quite making that step. In contrast, Katrina’s encounters with the dead are short, simple, and effective exactly because they are that way.