Yeah he was great, watching that Letterboxd video was funny because I immediately connected him to Reilly in Magnolia
my wife never talks during movies like EVER and at that scene she leaned over to me and said "you used to eat that many hot dogs yourself for lunch" and then leaned back over and didn't say peep the rest of the movie. i snorted.
Sitting down and splitting 8 hot dogs with your sweetie before being interrupted by a witch who puts you under a spell that causes you to headbutt your sweetie's face into oblivion? That's the nightmare
Surpassed Sinners as my best horror movie of the year. What a wild ride. Loved how they split the different perspectives and slowly had everything come together. Last 15 minutes were insane.
I didn’t consciously skip the 2nd trailer just forgot about it, but watching it now I’m glad I missed it and Whitmer Thomas showing up got to be a fun surprise
I’m sorry but all of this is shown / explained very clearly in the movie. I felt it was very clear that Alex wouldn’t have had an opportunity to get the magic sticks and break the spell if not for Justine and Archer going in and causing such a commotion. Their intervention was the ultimate catalyst that finally gave Alex the chance to beat Gladys. He couldn’t do anything to save himself/his family/the other kids until others came along. It works both literally and metaphorically! And also it was very clear that Gladys sent the mom (to cut her hair) + Marcus after Justine because for the entire first half of the film, Justine was the only one who was even the tiniest bit suspicious of what was going on in Alex’s house and could have reported it very easily! We saw exactly what she did the second she learned that Marcus even slightly entertained Justine’s suspicion and started digging into it. And she explicitly had Marcus confirm that he had not yet reported anything to the authorities before she put the spell on him. Anything getting traced back to her/Alex was her one concern before she turned him There are a lot of relatively big plot holes imo but those things are not it at all
I know that this works well metaphorically and all but probably my biggest plot gripe is this one kid survives the incident and also suddenly his completely normal-seeming parents are basically comatose stroke victims and they apparently don’t have *any* family/friends/neighbors/coworkers who are like “hey so uh they weren’t like that just a couple days/weeks ago and I never heard anything about a stroke, they actually just sorta disappeared”??? Or medical documentation showing the supposed strokes? That took me out of the movie quite a bit because the whole initial set-up made it seem like everything about Alex’s life seemed normal from the outside. But from an outsider observer’s perspective there’s no universe where the situation seems normal. They probably should have had his parents be relatively weird shut-ins from the start or something. But then that would possibly require altering the ending a bit as well, idk
But this was entertaining enough to overlook that stuff because as I said it does work well enough metaphorically. And the scares were excellent Though definitely the best reaction my theater’s crowd had was tons of people’s laughter at the mom clumsily walking out to Justine’s car quickly turn to horrified reactions as they heard the car door open lol
Sorry for the multiple posts, but also wanted to note what I thought were two hysterical moments that my theater’s crowd didn’t seem to appreciate at all: -When Archer goes to the one kid’s mom and asks to see the security footage and she says no, but then he immediately goes to Justin Long and he says yes, and they even show the mom standing there disapprovingly. Felt very much like a “mom said no, so I’ll go ask dad without telling him that mom said no” moment lol -When James sees all the fucked up shit in the house and escapes but apparently decides to just go right back to trying to pawn stolen stuff. Felt like a callback to the tape measure scene in Barbarian Also every time it showed possessed people running I couldn’t stop thinking that were doing the Naruto run