It’s a simple question: How would you escape from a deranged serial killer if you couldn’t move a single muscle in your body? The answer, of course, is “with the help of some very contrived screenwriting,” but the contrivances are half the fun of Brian Netto and Adam Schindler’s “Don’t Move,” a small and sweaty genre exercise that should play well for anyone in the mood to watch a Netflix thriller that doesn’t aspire to be anything else.
Produced by Sam Raimi, and liberally sprinkled with his devious sensibilities, “Don’t Move” is nothing if not one of the most 84-minute films you’ll stream this year. Aside from a few errant character details, the basic premise of T.J. Cimfel and David White’s screenplay practically doubles as its plot: A grieving mother named Iris (“Yellowstone” famous Kelsey Asbille) slips out of bed one morning and drives by herself into the heart of Big Sur (played by a Daniel Day-Lewis-worthy Bulgaria), where she plans on jumping off the same cliff from which her young son recently fell to his death.
But Iris isn’t as alone as she thinks. A handsome stranger appears out of nowhere, and — calmly sharing a story of his own trauma — does what he can to talk Iris off the ledge (“Richard” is a fun role for the ever-reliable Finn Wittrock, a square-jawed actor with a name for “Glee” and a face for neo-noir). “Broken doesn’t have to mean hopeless,” Richard tells her. And he would know.
But Richard is broken (in a fittingly Ryan Murphy sort of way), and it turns out that he only wants Iris to live so that he can have the pleasure of killing her on his terms, a process that starts — as it does for all of Richard’s prey — with the injection of a “special relaxant” that slowly deprives Iris of any control over her body. She’s on her feet when she first manages to escape from Richard’s car in the middle of the forest, but it won’t be long before her legs begin to go numb, and in less than 20 minutes her eyelids will be the only things that still work.
Netto and Schindler take pains to point out the irony of Iris’ predicament: Iris has emerged from the emotionally catatonic state that she’s been in since the day of her son’s accident… just to wind up in a physically catatonic state at the site of her son’s accident. Her desire to die was the only thing strong enough to get her out of bed in the morning; her desire to live will have to be even stronger if she hopes to survive until noon.
“Don’t Move” is eager to bolster itself with a few Jigsaw-adjacent bon mots, but — as is often the case with the “Saw” movies themselves — its “life is beautiful” credo is just a pretense for the primitive fun of watching someone try to avoid an ugly death. The big difference here is that Netto and Schindler are less interested in pulpy sadism than they are in pure suspense. Their heroine can’t feel anything to begin with (and what pain could be worse than losing a child?), so the “most dangerous game” they stage for her naturally tends to emphasize the peril of an apathetic world over the threat of a determined killer.
One early setpiece finds Iris using her last ounce of strength to will herself into a stream; floating on her back towards the rapids below, she can only hope that nature is more forgiving to her in this moment than it was on the day when a single misstep took her son. The action isn’t directed with any particular gusto, but Netto and Schindler capably emphasize Iris’ helplessness in a series of indifferent wide shots, and Asbille — locked into a pout with nothing else at her disposal — does some of the most expressive eye acting this side of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” or the tea scene from “Get Out.”
Each of her pupils deserves its own SAG card for the sequence that follows, in which Iris is given shelter by a grizzled widower (Moray Treadwell) whose palpable “undecided voter energy” is put to the test when Richard knocks on the door in search of his “ailing wife.” The scenario epitomizes a cat-and-mouse thriller that’s at its best when bringing other people into the mix, if only because these innocent bystanders help to underline how Iris is at the mercy of forces beyond her control, as powerless to call out Richard’s lies as she is to argue against her son’s fate. The second half of “Don’t Move” lacks the momentum of the first, but it leans even harder into the idea that Richard can play with his food in plain sight; salvation is right there on the other side of a car window, but it might as well be a million miles away. Such is the burden of loss on a beautiful morning.
But please don’t take this to mean that “Don’t Move” starts reaching for a metaphor that’s out of its grasp — the movie isn’t glib about Iris’ grief, but it mostly uses her pain to ground the wanton silliness around her. This is the kind of movie where nobody acts like a real person (every stray character we meet is somehow both way too paranoid and also totally useless at the same time), and it’s also the kind of movie where you wouldn’t want them to.
Richard is the most ridiculous of the lot, and while “Don’t Move” doesn’t commit to the “hot sociopath” of it all with anything close to the same level of texture or feeling that made “Trap” so much fun, Wittrock has a fine handle on how to balance shlock with sincerity (a hard-earned consolation prize for acting on seven Ryan Murphy shows). A better film might have given Richard a more credible backstory, but it would be a very different film from the one Netto and Schindler are making here, where Richard is more valuable as a smirk for Iris to wipe off than he would’ve been as a layered villain with legitimate pathos.
Like Asbille, Wittrock is perfect in a streaming movie that barely aspires to be good, and while it would be wildly overstating the case to suggest that “Don’t Move” is a piece of great trash that people will hold onto for years to come, having any degree of fun with a disposable Netflix thriller is reason to celebrate, especially when it’s the kind of thriller that no one else is really making anymore (case in point: This is an indie that Netflix quietly acquired after it was finished). Their model might be broken, but, as Richard might say, broken doesn’t have to mean hopeless.
Grade: B-
“Don’t Move” is now streaming on Netflix.
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