1 out of 5

Director: Adam Wingard

Perhaps in response to the glut of torture porn movies during the early 00s, we’re starting to gather a small pile of slow-burn gut churners, that don’t shy from gore but are willing to take 90 minutes to get there.  Every splinter of every genre will certainly have its highlights, but ‘A Horrible Way to Die’ doesn’t sell me on this particular brew.  If something in a film is interesting or uncomfortable, showing it at length does not necessarily make it more interesting or more uncomfortable.  Director Adam Wingard has been making waves in the horror scene with his no frills, down-home experimental style, and for ‘Horrible,’ he seems to be after that “Longest amount of screentime allotted to one page of script” award that has been previously held by Ti West.  Working from a script by now frequent collaborator Simon Barrett, Wingard allows his key actors plenty of room for their mostly one-shade characters – AJ Bowen and Amy Seimetz find surprising amount of nuance as serial killer Garrick Turrell and his ex-girlfriend Sarah, respectively (Swanberg feels a little out-of-place, however) – but without an actual scene to focus on, Wingard lets his shaky-cam go wild and decides to stitch everything together with painfully slow fade ins and outs that equal a big snooze.  Though the accompanying minimal score by Quilted Crystal is quite beautiful and the cold cinematography is well juxtaposed against the ‘warmth’ of the climax setting, neither help a viewer to raise their eyelids.  The final sequence of the film is unexpected, for as ploddingly obvious as the rest of the storyline is, but Barrett hasn’t really been able to follow his Dead Birds script with anything that isn’t what we see here – one highlight capping extended phoned-in writing.  There are good elements buried here, but this director and writer team may take a few more experiments before they realize a truly solid film.