In short: Truth or Dare (2018)

A group of pretty, diverse, yet bland mid-twenties teen friends (Lucy Hale, Hayden Szeto, Sophia Ali, Tyler Posey, Violett Beane and a couple of others) do the spring break debauchery thing the movies have convinced me all young Americans do whenever the sun comes up, which would certainly explain a lot. Lured into a ruined church by a dude with a hipster beard, they start a game of truth or dare.

Alas, hipster beard has involved them in a supernatural game that doesn’t stop once they have arrived back home. It will later turn out the game is possessed by a demon (imagine a sarcastic tone in my voice here), uses a special variant of the rules nobody has ever heard of before, and kills everyone off who doesn’t tell a truth or follow through with a dare. The truths are of course the film’s attempt at playing psychological games with the characters, while the dares and the kills look like desperate grasps at copying the Final Destination franchise, without the imagination and the black humour of the better films of that series.

This lack of imagination is the greatest problem of Jeff Wadlow’s teen horror flick. It feels very much like a film designed to grab elements of other, better films and somehow turn them into a movie of its own, without ever finding an actual reason why these elements should come together. There’s a dollop of It Waits but replacing that film’s actual insight into its teenage characters with, and turning its thoughtfulness about sexuality and friendship into particularly bland The C&W style melodrama. There’s the Final Destination influence, but without the sense of fun and mischief and without the imaginative side of the kills. There’s a grab bag of other influences – the pointless demonic possession angle, a badly stolen idea here, another there – but what there isn’t is a coherent film. There’s no insight, no thematic development, and characterisation that pretends to dive deep but never actually does.

Wadlow’s direction is certainly slick, and a couple of scenes are even creepy if taken as one-offs instead of parts of a narrative, but the director never manages to develop the flow that might at least have turned this into a fun rollercoaster ride. Because that’s not enough to annoy me, Truth or Dare is also another one of those films about supernatural games that changes its rules whenever its writers have written themselves into a corner, instead of constructing the narrative around the rules they establish.


To add insult to injury, Truth or Dare ends on a note that makes its surviving characters look like absolute egomaniac tossers and makes no sense whatsoever (see my complaint about rules above), while making absurd GIRL FRIENDSHIP! gestures.