The film is so cautious about revealing anything that going in blind is ideal, so I will keep my specifics to the spoiler box (and you really shouldn’t spoil it for yourself), but the film is another in the proud tradition of Empty House Horrors, sitting comfortably alongside works like the House of the Devil and the first act of When a Stranger Calls Back in terms of creating and maintaining an almost unbearable tension in little more than being alone in a cavernous building, here a boarding school. We follow three young women: two students who have, for different reasons, not been picked up for a weeklong break, and a third woman played by Emma Roberts, whose connection to the rest of the story remains a mystery until halfway through.
The film sports a strange, almost non-sequitur first act that only quite fits together in retrospect, and it starts the viewer off on the proper disorientation. The three central performances by Roberts, Lucy Boynton, and Kiernan Shipka are all terrific, but it’s Shipka who shines here. I’m not familiar with her as an actress but she brings such an uneasy cadence to her line readings and interpersonal approach that the persistent avoidance of proper social cues is as unnerving as anything else here. It’s an unsettling and effective performance even before the more horrific aspects turn up.
As things often must in these kind of films, the tension eventually transforms into violent release, and initially these conventional genre moments are so disappointing (as they were in the House of the Devil) for breaking the teeth-clenching stress of unease with far less interesting materialization of dread. I was prepared for most of the film to give this a pass regardless in deference to its highly effective style, but then the film reveals it has a brain in its head to match its fashionable exterior. I think even revealing the subset of horror film this movie belongs to is a spoiler (avoid the back cover text on the Blu-ray— I thankfully did), but even if you fail to avoid that, this film goes above and beyond by arriving on an idea that is so simple yet so goddamn clever in how it finds a new way into such a tired genre that I felt pure joy when I figured out what was going on. The film thus does the House of the Devil one better— I don’t have to pretend the last five minutes didn’t happen, because it’s the ending that elevates this above mere aesthetic pleasures: