Mark Reviews Movies: MASQUERADE (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 29, 2021

It's pretty clear that writer/director Shane Dax Taylor is counting on the big reveal of Masquerade to carry the day. It is, admittedly, a somewhat clever twist (although even Taylor seems uncertain if he has communicated it effectively, since an unnecessary final transition makes it about as obvious as possible), but there's a whole movie before that to consider.

It's a home-invasion story about a pair of thieves breaking into a remote mansion. They are there to steal art and, in the process, end up terrorizing a pre-teen girl, who's oddly written and spoken about as if she's much, much younger (One imagines Taylor realized too late that a young child couldn't do everything the character has to do or be tormented with such regularity as she is here).

Meanwhile, Rose (Bella Thorne) is a server at a fundraiser at a bar, where Olivia (Mircea Monroe) and Daniel (Austin Nichols) are unaware of what's happening at their home. Rose makes mysterious calls to someone and eventually arranges to drive the wealthy couple home.

Some discretion is necessary, if only because Taylor uses editing to show us one story, while he's actually telling another. Some of the overall plotting seems inconsistent, but it's mostly clarified by the finale.

What isn't clarified, though, is a lot of what's happening in the house, as those two burglars (played by Michael Proctor and Skyler Samuels) get into a pretty lazy, mostly unconvincing cat-and-mouse game with Casey (Alyvia Alyn Lind), the girl who's left alone to evade and outsmart the apparently murderous thieves. A significant issue is that the layout of the house makes little sense and sometimes defies logic. Casey ends up barricaded in her room, and somehow, one of the thieves manages to enter the bedroom through another conveniently appearing door, which, later, rather inconveniently disappears.

Taylor obviously isn't invested in ensuring that the plotting here, as we witness it unfold, makes any logical, geographical, or architectural sense. He's definitely not interested in making Rose's long and delaying drive to the rich couple's house have any kind of significance, because to offer any information about these characters would be to give away the movie's bigger game.

That's the game about which Taylor primarily cares, but ultimately, Masquerade doesn't work. While the filmmaker has planned for the general scheme of what happens, he barely gives a thought to the specifics.

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