Film review – You’re Next

You’re Next

Adam Wingard and Simon Barret’s You’re Next is available on Limited Edition Dual UHD/Blu-ray Box set on 19 August 2024 courtesy of Second Sight Films. It will also be available in Standard Editions.

Here are my notes from 2011.

By some odd coincidence, I saw You’re Next the same week I saw The Purge: different genres (one science fiction, one horror) but a surprisingly similar scenario – folk with plastic masks besieging and attacking a well-off family in a well-appointed home and being driven back by desperate measures, with some twists in the last reel that shift the locus of evil from the usual lowlife psycho outsiders to callous, privileged folk.  It’s probably reading too much into things to draw a conclusion that this brand of horror – which has evolved from the likes of Straw Dogs to The Strangers – is mutating to reflect a different attitude to privilege in America, but there is an underlying suggestion here that ruthless evil is the path to success but still won’t protect you from the righteous fury of the excluded.  Apart from anything else, this is more of a fun action-horror-suspense piece than we’ve seen lately – yes, there are very gruesome deaths and some cruel turns, but it lacks the sexualised torture that has made so many recent horrors such a miserable watch.

After a prologue in which special guest neighbour Larry Fessenden is stalked and killed in his own home (with the title written in his girlfriend’s blood on a window), we follow bearded, meek, sort-of nebbishy Crispian (AJ Bowen) and his more confident Australian girlfriend Erin (Sharni Vinson) as they turn up to spend the weekend with Crispian’s well-off parents (Rob Moran, Barbara Crampton) and his siblings and their partners in a large old isolated house.  There are hints from early on that not all is well in the family – Mom is a pill-popping neurotic and Crispian’s brothers Drake (Joe Swanberg) and Felix (Nicholas Tucci) are an overcompetitive bully and a slacker lowlife respectively, and their partners are a snob (Margaret Laney) and a reticent goth (Wendy Glenn), whereas his sister (Amy Seimetz) has brought an underground filmmaker (Ti West) to the party.  During a well-scripted and played dinner scene that descends into an all-out argument, the filmmaker notices something through the window, gets up  from the table and takes a crossbow bolt through the head.  Killers in cheap animal masks – Lamb, Tiger, Fox, a bit like the Batman villains The Terrible Three – are out there, and whittle down the cast with razor-wire, machetes and the like.  Escape plans are proposed, tried out and fail badly, until Crispian manages to get away – what even he doesn’t know is that his girlfriend was raised on a survivalist compound by a nutcase and turns out to be ‘really good at killing people’, turning the tables on the killers, and catching on that some members of the party have set this up since they’d rather inherit a fortune than have a living, extended family.

Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett teamed, with Bowen, on A Horrible Way to Die, which was an impressive, downbeat, dead serious serial killer drama.  Here, they’re having fun, delivering shocks and surprises and death-by-blender stuff, along with some great straight-faced humour (Bowen’s last reel speech is a deadpan hoot).  Vinson, becoming more bloodied and bedraggled as she shows off her improvisational death-trap skills and takes on a succession of outclassed baddies, is aces, and the whole cast display a touch more subtlety than is really required as the venal, flawed, doomed victims and victimisers.  A deadfall trap with an axe over the front door gets a Chekhovian plant two-thirds of the way through, and people come and go by the windows until the expected, still funny punchline.