Lean Thriller Don’t Move Fights the Good Fight to Put One Foot in Front of the Other
Traditionally, one would likely hope their horror-thriller directorial debut would garner adjectives in the vein of “propulsive,” “energetic,” or “non-stop,” words just waiting for a PR professional to swoop in and slap a nonexistent exclamation point on there for use in a dust jacket/poster excerpt. You know, bombastic words! High-energy words! Words that imply a pulse-raising, breakneck “thrill ride.” Adam Schindler and Brian Netto’s Don’t Move, on the other hand, is at its heart a movie about enervation rather than adrenaline, a humble but slick fight for survival that benefits from a solid, bare-bones screenplay and duo of steady performances, as a single woman battles her own slowly shutting down body in the hopes of overcoming a killer. Here it’s less a matter of being able to move quickly as it is being able to move at all.
If that sounds evocative of some of the early sequences of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1, as The Bride tries to will her big toe into following orders, I imagine Schindler and Netto wouldn’t mind the comparison, and that kind of mind-over-matter mastery forms a prominent part of the Netflix thriller’s screenplay from T.J. Cimfel and David White. Injected with a paralytic drug by a man who seems to be a seasoned serial killer, Don’t Move’s wily protagonist Iris (Kelsey Asbille) faces grim odds of survival as she tries to elude the man, far from civilization or rescue.
For most thrillers, the fight-or-flight response or never-say-die of the protagonist would be instantly assumed by the audience rather than mulled over or considered, but Don’t Move complicates the motivations of Iris somewhat by first filling us in on a bit of backstory: She’s suicidally depressed after the accidental death of her young son, who seemingly plunged to his doom from a rural cliffside vantage point while his parents were busying themselves with other tasks. As she travels to that cliff early in the morning in the film’s opening moments, phone left conspicuously on the charger back home, it’s clear that Iris intends to join her son, entirely consumed by guilt and hopelessness. It isn’t until she’s teetering on the brink–literally–that she meets another innocuous seeming man (Finn Wittrock) out here in the lonely expanse of wilderness. And wouldn’t you know it, he has some kind, supportive and affirming things to say, identifying himself as someone who has also experienced this particular strain of soul-eroding grief. He’s surprisingly effective in talking her back from the edge, but of course that’s all a ruse–he fully intends for Iris to end up dead, but it would be a shame if it happened before he’s had his sadistic way with her.
Thus are set the stakes: Our protagonist wants death, but not on this man’s terms. That she reacts to the unexpected appearance of this stranger in the woods with warmth at all suggests that perhaps these screenwriters had already locked in said screenplay before this spring’s viral “man or bear” debate, in which an overwhelming majority of women asserted they would far rather run across a bear in the woods than a lone man, so ever-present is the unspoken threat of male violence in our society. Watching Don’t Move, it’s difficult to argue with the women voicing that opinion: A bear may maul you, but it’s distinctly unlikely to tie you up, paralyze you and attempt to take you back to its torture cabin in the woods. Bears are practical, men are delusional. And playing dead isn’t much help either, when facing down a cinematic psychopath.
Actor Finn Wittrock, an American Horror Story regular, plays that psycho as the conniving type–a guy who knows his pop psychology well enough to tap into the affirming things Iris clearly wants to hear in the moment, until he has her where he wants her. His character has forged his own tragic backstory into a delusional mandate from above, one that he’s implied to have carried out numerous times in the past. “You’re not the first,” he tells Iris, trying to skip ahead of all the token resistance and desperate pleading he’s clearly experienced with other victims. He’s light on his feet, able to quickly confabulate backstories and elaborate lies when confronted by authority figures or potential rescuers, and not above using weaponized tears and theatrics to engender sympathy (or just pity) when all else fails. At the same time, he’s not quite the Keyser Söze-esque mastermind he clearly envisions himself to be, and much of the film hinges on the tense interactions between Wittrock’s killer and other minor characters as they verbally probe each other and the audience wonders how much he’ll be able to get away with before needing to resort to violence once again. Throughout, he’s continuously digging himself into a deeper trench of culpability and failure as he tries to keep the wheels from coming off his little murder endeavor, his manic energy largely carrying the narrative forward.
Where’s Iris through all this? Well, it comes down to some combination of running, limping, crawling and finally laying, as the paralytic agent takes hold. She begins an ill-engineered escape through the woods still able to more or less shake a leg, but that mobility is fleeting, and each minute spent hiding is one she won’t be able to use to put more distance between her and the killer, though it does give us a few lovely moments of stillness in the well-shot forested sequences. It’s not quite the pastorally patient murder hike of this year’s In a Violent Nature, but the seemingly calming background burble of birdsong and rushing creek water makes for a nice counterbalance to the advancing threat of both the killer and the danger of being incapacitated in a place where you might end up say, covered in flesh-eating ants. If the whole film had been set out here, it might have made a fitting addition to our list of the best wilderness horror movies.