Mark Reviews Movies: FEAR (2023)

Fear, Hidden Empire Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 27, 2023

There are a couple points during Fear that one might—probably will, actually—wonder if screenwriters John Ferry and Deon Taylor have any idea what the threat of their horror movie is. The title gives some of it away, of course, because this ultimately is the story of a group of friends who are confronted by the deepest fears while spending a weekend at a remote lodge in the woods. It's not until the third act that the filmmakers do anything with that generic premise, so this is more the case of a movie eventually being about that idea.

Until that point, it almost seems as if Taylor, who also directs, is playing some kind of memory game with us. Can we remember any of the ideas that are established early in this movie when they finally arise and after spending so much time meandering around with a bunch of dull characters?

There's a scene here in which all of the friends, sitting around a campfire, offer up their biggest fears one by one. After a bit of listening to this group, it starts to feel akin to homework. We know Taylor is essentially going to quiz us by way of having these characters face those fears by the end, but the phobias are so generic, the characters are so bland, and the delay before any of it actually pays off that it's tough to remember what those fears are, to recall who's afraid of what, or to find any reason to care about any of this in the first place.

The excuse for the trip is threefold. First, Rom (Joseph Sikora) is a best-selling author whose next book, a prologue featuring a TV interview with the character helpfully informs us, will be on the subject of fear itself. For a reason that's held off until much later (It's almost as if Ferry and Taylor figured they'd decide on the back story once they arrived at that point in writing the script), his research necessitates a trip to this lodge.

The second reason is that's a reunion for this group of friends, who have been isolated from each other on account of a pandemic (It might be the most recent one or a completely different one, although setting the movie in the middle of this year shows either past pessimism about COVID-19 or a cynical attempt at foresight about what's to come). Rom has invited the friends of his and of his girlfriend Bianca (Annie Ilonzah), an asthmatic who's paranoid about catching the disease, to belatedly celebrate her birthday. The third reason is the actual one, which is for the group to celebrate a wedding proposal that Rom fails to offer upon arriving at the lodge as planned.

Anyway, little of this—like the characters, the plotting, the logic of what's happening here, or the very threat of which we're supposed to be scared—matters. Rom, Bianca, and all of their friends—including Russ (Terrence Jenkins), Lou (Tip "T.I." Harris), Michael (Iddo Goldberg), Serena (Ruby Modine), and a few others who somehow matter less—exist to be freaked out and sequentially killed by the virus, something supernatural, fear itself, or whatever doesn't matter enough to specify until the finale, apparently.

Members of the group start having hallucinations, which lets Taylor try the usual tricks of showing us allegedly eerie things that aren't really there, letting the characters become increasingly paranoid about their surroundings and each other, and giving us several cheap scare attempts that repeatedly fall flat. Initially, the group believes the virus, with side effects that include coughing and hallucinations and near-instant death, has become airborne.

Later, it becomes clear that the legend Rom is researching for his book is probably to blame, although the revelation feels less like foreshadowing and more like the filmmakers flipping a coin. The nature of the legend is as generic as the rules about its effects on people are inconsistent. At times, everything is inside the affected person's head, but at others, the thing seems to have a physical presence that can drag people down stairs or lift them into the air. Whatever happens to them, though, is anticlimactic, because the deaths go all the way back to those awkwardly established and quickly forgotten fears, while also occurring so quickly that there's no suspense to these scenes.

There's little thought behind the narrative of Fear on a foundational level. The result is a horror movie that plays as a hodgepodge of alternately frustrating and laughable clichés.

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