It’s important for movies to ask serious questions. Brian Netto and Adam Schindler’s new Netflix thriller “Don’t Move” asks a very, very big one: What if a scene that would only be a couple minutes long in any other movie was the whole damn movie?
“Don’t Move” makes a decent attempt to address themes of mortality and depression but more than anything it’s a formal filmmaking exercise. In a nutshell, the film stars Kelsey Asbille (“Yellowstone”) as Iris, a mother mourning the accidental death of her son. At the start of the film she nearly takes her own life on a hiking trail. She’s interrupted by Richard, played by Finn Wittrock (“Origin”), who snaps her out of it and helps her remember that “Broken doesn’t have to mean hopeless.”
Then, right when Iris has finally rediscovered her will to live, Richard tases her, ties her up, and dumps her in his backseat. It turns out Richard is a serial killer, and just to make Iris’s day even worse, he’s drugged her with a concoction that will soon render her paralyzed for an hour. So now she’s got to find a way to save herself without moving.
Thrillers about being drugged and running out of options take many forms, from the manic amusement of Neveldine/Taylor’s “Crank” movies to the nihilistic desperation of Rudolph Maté’s “D.O.A.” With “Don’t Move,” Netto and Schindler have made their jobs harder by reversing how a ticking clock usually functions: When the time runs out Iris won’t die, she’ll actually be able to fight back. So the question isn’t so much how to stop the clock but how to survive until the alarm goes off.
To make this little trick work “Don’t Move” employs spot-on cinematography from Zach Kuperstein (“Barbarian”), who uses stillness to his advantage with stressful closeups and POV shots. Kelsey Asbille also proves herself up to the film’s challenge, since she conveys a litany of emotions and problem-solving thought processes with very few tools at her disposal.
But more than anything, “Don’t Move” relies on the cleverness of its writers to come up with a way to make a sequence where the hero gets drugged — often an excuse for a time jump and location change — into an engine that can run for 90 whole minutes. And I can say with absolute confidence that they have partly pulled it off.
As a series of set pieces, “Don’t Move” finds a blood-curdling balance between Iris thinking her way out of problems while helplessly relying on the caprices of cruel fate. An old hermit named William (Moray Treadwell) nearly runs her over with his lawnmower, which she has no control over, but when he tries to communicate with her all she can do is blink. And boy, does she have a lot to explain with just some blinks. She has to communicate clearly with a man who may or may not be willing or able to help her, especially when Richard comes a-calling. That whole sequence is pure Hitchcockian joy, a bomb that could explode at any minute if plans go wrong or if life just turns to chaos.
The problem is that in order to get to these suspenseful centerpieces, Richard has to make some of the most foolish decisions in the history of serial killing. When Iris is tied up in his backseat she’s able to cut her way out of her bindings using a Swiss Army knife, which she has because — as Richard himself admits — he just kinda forgot to search his victim today.
So that’s how she’s able to get out of his car and into a situation where she could theoretically survive this encounter. And since Iris needs to keep an eye on the time throughout the movie, Richard also decides to let her keep her iWatch, since there’s no cell phone reception in the mountains. Even though the mountains are full of residences which would obviously have wifi. And also they drive past gas stations. Anyway, it’s a risk he’s willing to take. After all, it’s way too hard to take off a watch.
Richard is basically the villain from “The Vanishing” if he got super-duper lazy. He’s also terrible at talking his way out of random encounters. He tries to pull the old misogynistic bullcrap about how Iris is his wife and she’s mentally unstable and/or an alcoholic, so that’s why she’s acting weird and why you shouldn’t read anything into how frightened and injured she looks, Richard is a man and he’s totally got this. But he doesn’t have a knack for improv.
Finn Wittrock makes the most of his own character’s limitations, but unlike Iris, Richard’s problems don’t exist to be cleverly solved. They exist to be exploited by Iris. So Richard does smart things when it serves the plot and makes nonsensical choices when, likewise, it serves the plot. Wittrock does a fine job of making Richard seem like the kind of villain who could charm his way through life when there isn’t a paralyzed victim in his car and making him look bad, but how he managed to get away with these murders for so long is the film’s biggest mystery.
Again, “Don’t Move” is a genre exercise. An experiment to see whether this one element of a serial killer story can be successfully expanded into a whole feature. And the thing about experiments is that they don’t have to be entirely successful to be worth doing. Brian Netto and Adam Schindler’s gimmicky nail-biter is intense and creative enough to quicken your heartbeat and make you wonder if you’d be clever enough to survive in the same situation. It’s a damn good time if you like thrillers.
But the film’s greatest value is as an exploration of filmmaking minutiae, an earnest attempt to do something new by shifting the perspective on something old. If that gives future filmmakers new and bright ideas, it’ll all have been worth it. And if those same filmmakers also learn what not to do in the process — like not making your villain a doofus just because it grease’s the plot’s wheels a bit — all the better.
“Don’t Move” is now streaming on Netflix.
