Most everyone has seen their fair share of home invasion movies. As a matter of fact, one called The Purge came out earlier this summer, made a lot of money, and was awful. What director Adam Wingard is hoping is that you’ve never seen one quite like his newest film, You’re Next, which starts off with a setup typical of slashers like The Purge, but pretty quickly spins off in a different direction entirely. A lot of people are going to watch You’re Next because of its marketing, anticipating a scary movie about a group of victims who get terrorized by people in creepy animal masks. Those people are likely going to walk away from this one disappointed. This isn’t the scary movie with the demented killers and the terrified victims that many are expecting. It’s tense, and it has moments that resemble horror, but actually it ends up being much more of an action film.
You’re Next works simultaneously as a commentary on slasher movies as well as a complete subversion of them. As soon as the matriarch of the reunited family who make up the protagonists immediately demands to evacuate the house the second she hears a strange noise, it becomes clear that this isn’t going to be the standard horror story that leads the usual cattle characters to slaughter. The obvious holes in logic you futilely yell at the screen about aren’t going to go unaddressed this time. As a matter of fact, You’re Next finally gives us a home invasion movie protagonist (Sharni Vinson’s Erin) who doesn’t at all act stupid in service of the plot and its need to constantly create new perilous situations. Instead, it gives us a capable, intelligent protagonist, and consequently becomes a completely different type of movie—one with a darwinian plot where the least capable characters die first and the ones who keep cool heads last until the end, no matter what their status as hero or villain is. Essentially, what Wingard and company are doing here is answering the question of what a horror movie would look like if the characters actually listened to the suggestions louder audiences are always yelling at them.
The nuts and bolts of the film are nothing to be impressed by, but nothing to be all that horrified with either. It’s a low budget film that’s mostly interested in creating laughs and entertaining violence, so you don’t think much about the directing. Early on the camera work gets a bit erratic, which is troublesome for a bit. During the initial attack scenes the camera jerks around the room, doing too much of the work of creating panic in the characters and the viewers. But once the tone of the film changes, the way it’s shot also calms down into a steady rhythm. Some of the gore is of the too-fake kind also, where the blood just doesn’t quite look like any blood you’ve seen before. But most of it proves to be entertaining to watch anyway, and the effort to not use what would have been even crappier looking CG gore was certainly appreciated. These are small quibbles. While the filmmaking doesn’t ever get in the way, it’s not the attraction here either. The attraction is the inventiveness of the script, the humor, and the handful of performances you’ll walk out of the theater remembering fondly.
Indie filmmaker Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies) kind of steals the whole film as the cocky, dick brother of the family of adult siblings who are reuniting for their parents’ anniversary here. Douche just oozes from his pores in this role. You want to punch his stupid face every time he opens his stupid mouth. Some of the jerk things he says get some of the biggest laughs available in a sneakily funny movie, and yet he’s still somehow able to make you hate him, even as he’s being entertaining. Kudos. Clearly the movie belongs to Vinson though. It’s her character that’s designed for you to fall in love with, she gets the most to do, and even when the believability of what her character is able to pull off requires a few lines of clunky dialogue to explain, she still owns it all anyway. If her turn here doesn’t earn her a couple more roles in notable films, at least in the action or horror genres, it would come as a great surprise.
The big reason You’re Next is a solid recommendation though, aside from the genre-bending or the Meta commentary that it engages in, is just that it’s a whole lot of fun to watch. The family we’re introduced to are made up of all sorts of different personality types, and once their deep seated resentments and neuroses start coming out during the attack on their home, their interactions become so ridiculous that you can’t help but be amused by them. Too many movies like this play the interpersonal drama for drama, and it ends up paling in comparison to the more immediate drama of people dying and looking dumb. You’re Next smartly plays all of the character stuff for laughs. It comes up with a handful of inventive kills too, and said kills build up to a nice crescendo of violence by the end of the film. In fact, You’re Next is one of the rare movies that manages to end at the exact right moment, and it’s likely to leave you walking away from it feeling giddy as a result.
