There are many, many reasons to go back and rewatch Robert Zemeckis’s sleek 2000 thriller What Lies Beneath, his state-of-the-art stab at a Hitchcock. The timely autumnal atmosphere, the idyllic built-for-the-movie house, the two glamorous older stars, the one shock subversion of type and then there’s the horribly effective and highly ingenious suspense set piece involving a bathtub. Michelle Pfeiffer, in what was her last major studio lead performance, is trapped, paralysed by an experimental drug as water is rising. With Zemeckis and longtime cinematographer Don Burgess at their most playful, we follow her body shutting down and then in brief spurts, flashes of life, a struggle to survive using only random, unpredictable movements.
It’s a bravura sequence and one that was undoubtedly somewhere in the minds of the writers TJ Cimfel and David White as they came up with punchy, pre-Halloween Netflix chiller Don’t Move. It’s an extension of that unpleasant idea to an 85-minute runtime as a woman fights for her life while dealing with the effects of paralysis. Iris (Kelsey Asbille) is a grieving mother who becomes the latest target of a demented serial killer (Finn Wittrock), whom she meets in a remote forest when he pretends that he too is struggling with a major loss. But it’s a manipulative trap to lure her in before he injects a drug that will paralyse her, kicking off a desperate fight for survival as her body shuts down.
Cimfel and White, working with the director duo Adam Schindler and Brian Netto underneath the overseeing eye of the esteemed producer Sam Raimi, have given themselves an incredibly difficult task, to centre an entire film on a protagonist whose movements are increasingly restricted at best. It at times feels like a screenwriting exercise, for mostly better rather than worse, as they find creative ways to write themselves in and out of precarious situations. Iris’s hellish day includes tackling a fast-moving river, communicating with a kindly stranger and escaping a growing fire, and while the rules of what part of her body does and doesn’t work at any given moment might often feel loose, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the nightmarish escalation of it all. There’s some real suspense here and the pace, given the brisk runtime, rarely flags although an overlong and overwritten sequence involving a good samaritan could have benefited from a tightening, the film’s grip starting to weaken as it progresses. The film is at its best when words are secondary to action.
Asbille is saddled with a difficult task of her own – a mostly dialogue-free performance relying on vital finger and eye acting – and it’s sadly not one that she’s able to convincingly pull off. Her journey from paralysed by grief to literally paralysed to final girl fighting back doesn’t have enough energy or emotion to it with a low-level flatness that follows her even when she is in full control of her body (it doesn’t help that her last-act fuck-you quips are a little underpowered regardless of how she performs them). With the showier role, there’s a more easily persuasive turn from Wittrock, who has experience playing a deranged serial killer thanks to Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, and again he leans into the darkness that often comes alongside such well-maintained good looks.
Don’t Move doesn’t quite stick the landing as smoothly as one might hope with a few too many incredulous moments (not least trying to convince us that the Bulgarian shoot took place in the US) and some biffed one-liners, but there are enough heart-in-throat moments on the way there to separate this from most of the genre guff on Netflix. You might not be paralysed by fear but you’ll at least be prevented from switching over to something else.
Don’t Move is now available on Netflix
