A group of college students in their final year try to recapture the closeness of their freshmen time with a weekend together. There’s designated final girl and coding whiz Hannah (Madison Pettis), her eternal crush, nerd turned jock Drew (Jedediah Goodacre), stoner Clay (Richard Harmon, still playing a college kid), and lovers of mildly kinky sex, Kayla (Phoebe Miu) and Devon (Jordan Buhat). To make matters a bit awkward, Drew’s influencer girlfriend Lexi (Vanessa Morgan) has invited herself at the last minute, so we can get influencer jokes and a love triangle in one economic wash.
Because (alas?) these aren’t the 70s anymore, the friends aren’t spending their weekend of getting brutally murdered in a cabin in the woods, but in an incredibly advanced smart home in the woods. Unfortunately, its AI Margaux (the voice of Susan Bennett) doesn’t just torture its clients with awkward uses of cool kids language but is also heavily into serial murder.
If you’re going into Steven C. Miller’s Margaux looking for anything original, deep or intelligent, you’ll probably be sorely disappointed. If, on the other hand, you’re in for a bit of (very) dumb fun, you might have a good enough time. At least, I do have to admire how traditionalist the film is, starting with characters that are just barely modernized updates of slasher victim archetypes, through murder methods which are merrily ignoring logic and physics and ending with horrible one-liners from Margaux even the people writing late-period Freddy Krueger would have been a bit embarrassed by. The only elements here that are truly of our time are the increased number of people of colour in the cast and all of the (bad, typical) jokes about internet influencers and home automation. Which actually might be enough to get this one status as a fascinating time capsule thirty years on. Alexa, set a reminder for 2052!
Miller’s a more than decent director here, usually finding shots that make the cheapish effects (the gore’s good, though) and the low-ish budget look better than they probably deserve. Things keep moving zippily even though Margaux doesn’t really have quite enough victims for its running time and the kind of movie it is. Miller solves this problem with murder attempts and much less complicated – and sometimes pleasantly goofy - variations on traditional suspense tropes that reminded me a bit of a less complicated and clever Final Destination.
Which certainly isn’t the worst thing I could say about a bit of uncomplicated, cheap and cheery fun like Margaux.
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