Don't Move: A Movie Where The Victim And The Plot Both Get Paralyzed

 

"Don't Move" Movie Poster 

I've spent a significant portion of my life in a state of professional "not moving." As a connoisseur of the couch, a master of the duvet, and a card-carrying member of the Order of the Permanently-Reclined, the title Don't Move spoke to me on a spiritual, almost molecular level. I thought, "Finally, a film that understands my core philosophy. This is my anthem. This is my 'Scream' for the lethargic generation." Little did I know, the film was less about the beauty of sedentary living and more about a cruel, cynical joke played by a sadistic universe on a woman who, frankly, was doing a great job of not moving on her own.

The plot, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of watching this 90-minute cinematic masterpiece, is a simple, high-concept affair that someone probably pitched as "What if Saw, but the trap is a slow-acting muscle relaxant, and the budget is just... a forest?" Our hero, Iris (played by the wonderfully expressive Kelsey Asbille, who, bless her, has to do more acting with her eyebrows than most actors do with their entire bodies), is a grieving mother who is so utterly paralyzed by sorrow that she’s standing on a cliff, about to do the big swan dive. Enter Richard, a man who, if you had to cast "Generic Psychopath with a Backstory That Doesn't Actually Explain Anything," Finn Wittrock would be your guy. He talks her off the ledge with a sob story, then, in a twist that everyone on planet Earth saw coming from a mile away, tases her and injects her with a paralytic agent. The clock starts ticking. She has twenty minutes until she's a human log.

And the killer! Oh, Richard. He’s not a terrifying force of nature; he's more of a frustrated project manager. His master plan seems to be to inject his victims, wait for them to become immobile, and then… what? Drown them? Why all the hassle? If you’re a serial killer with access to a paralytic agent, why not just... use it and get on with it? Why the long, drawn-out forest adventure? His motivations are as clear as mud. We get a flimsy backstory about a girlfriend who died in a car crash, which somehow translated to "I now get off on watching women suffer." It’s the kind of simplistic, paperback-thriller psychology that makes you want to hand him a self-help book and tell him to get a hobby that doesn't involve zip ties. He's so consistently bad at his job—he has multiple opportunities to just finish what he started, but instead he gets sidetracked by a fire, a kindly old man, and a police officer who is, again, utterly useless. This guy couldn't kill a mosquito in a broom closet.

The ending, a nonsensical scene where Iris stabs Richard and thanks him for making her want to live, is the kind of cheap, feel-good catharsis that a high-school creative writing teacher would red-pen with a note that says "Please try harder." The whole film is a frustrating exercise in "will she, won't she" that ends on a note of "well, she did, but it didn't make any sense." It’s an ode to resilience that only works if you ignore the fact that the antagonist is a buffoon, the plot is a sieve, and the main character’s survival is based on a series of increasingly improbable events.

So, in conclusion, if you're looking for a genuine, heart-pounding thriller, you might want to move on. But if you want to spend an hour and a half laughing at the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of a film that thinks a woman being unable to move is the peak of cinematic terror, then by all means, pour yourself a glass of wine, get comfortable, and don't move. You’ll fit right in.