Sarah (Hailey Lauren) has inherited a house from her mother – though she has been estranged from the woman for years and the house holds only terrible memories. The house is in poor shape, with a tarpaulin held down by breeze blocks stretched over a gaping hole in the roof, and Sarah’s wary brother Michael (Tinus Seaux), who has got rid of the rotting furniture, advises her to sell, though she feels hanging on to the place would be some kind of ‘ultimate fuck you’ though she can’t specify to whom that would be addressed.
This was obviously once a post-card suburb – tiny flashbacks have much brighter colour – but now is drab and desolate, caught in an academy frame stasis which renders the whole neighbourhood as a kind of limbo. The only apparent other resident is Sandy (Kelsey Pribilski), a presence in a pink tracksuit who is oddly insistent on rules about lawn-mowing and putting up Christmas lights but can’t seem to process that ‘Mrs Green’ is dead. She also says that Sarah reminds her of her own mother, which unsettles the younger woman – who is in good physical shape from jogging but clearly poor mental health, and the day-drinking and bong-hitting doesn’t really take the edge off her longstanding problems. Sarah gets more and more spooked by Sandy, who is given to peering through uncurtained windows, and less inclined to be gentle in rebuffing overtures like cookies. Pizza delivery guy Rick (Richard C. Jones) vibes with Sarah but warns her that Sandy’s father used to be chief of police so calling the cops on her won’t be much use. Sandy mumbles that the pizza guy is ‘a bad influence’. She also doesn’t like Avery (Danielle Evon Ploeger), Sarah’s friend from the city who comes for a stay-over.
The slow-burning creepfest segues at mid-point into something more Tobe Hooperish (this is an Austin-based film) with brutal attacks and confinement in Sandy’s own gruesome dollhouse. Antagonists Sarah and Sandy both have family tragedies in childhood, and the extent of their culpabilities in them is disputed – as ever in psycho-movies, mothers have a lot to be blamed for. Writer-director John Valley seeds the film with elements which will pay off – those breeze blocks, a tap in the parched garden, a Halloween-style wire hanger used as mlti-purpose tool and weapon, the late police chief’s cop paraphenalia – but this is as much an acting exercise as a suspense piece and Lauren and Pribilski are outstanding as folk you just can’t be comfortable around though they both have been shaped by long-ago abuses. I’m not 100% sold on the punchline, though it’s an effective callback to the 1970s with its own spin.