Main cast: Emily van Raay (Rose), Andrew Creer (Tommy), Michelle Treacy (Dana), Stephanie Moran (Lily), Bradley Hamilton (Mark), and Madelaine Gionet (Natalie)
Director: Sonny Mallhi
Hurt, a slasher movie that has the Blumhouse Productions stamp on it, tells me that it is “inspired” by true events the moment it starts. Well, I suppose that they must have taken the wrong true events to be inspired by, then, because the only danger present here is expiring from terminal boredom. There’s probably a reason why it just got a proper release recently when it was made in 2018.
Anyway, the opening scene has some lady terrorized by a huge man wearing a baby-face mask, but then the movie goes into a more dramatic mode. I meet Rose, finally reuniting with her husband Tommy when he comes back from his military deployment. They and Rose’s sister Lily along with Lily’s husband Mark coexist in this weird continuum where no one really likes one another, but just stay together anyway because the movie requires them to. Much of the screen time is devoted to these people just talking slowly and staring at some spot off the camera (maybe the buffet table).
There is something about Tommy getting triggered by the screams and sounds of a Halloween-based theme park, possibly activating his killer mode, but sadly, I never really get a movie that allows me to cheer for a killer to mow down the annoying characters stinking up the screen.
This movie is a little over 90 minutes long, but it feels as long as 9,000 hours past eternity. This is because director and co-screenwriter Sonny Mallhi has aspirations of artistic grandeur. A typical scene of this movie is two people exchanging profound-seeming statements that actually say nothing of substance, each word utterly slowly, with long pauses here and there for… I don’t know, “mood”, I guess.
After one character has stopped talking, the camera will zoom in on the other character’s face as that character just stares blankly at an area off the camera and stays silent for a few minutes. I’m not kidding. Then that character talks slowly some equally vapid stuff that is meant to be deep, and the whole thing repeats so that a single short conversation is stretched out needlessly to twice or thrice the length of a normal exchange.
Sometimes there will be scenes of these characters talking, but there is no sound, because… I don’t know, art?
I’m just here to watch people getting killed, and instead I am gazing into the abyss that is the depths of the director’s navel.
Yeah, yeah, there is a killer around, but that is not as important as scenes after scenes of the whiny, self-absorbed Rose crying slowly for way too long. Art, baby, art!
Hurt is the second movie directed and co-written by Mr Mallhi, as he mostly served producer or writer in other films on his CV. Maybe he should stick to producing or writing, because when he has free rein over everything about the movie, the result just hurts me badly.
