3 out of 5

Director: Sean Byrne

This is a solid three star entry. Doesn’t quite make it to four, as the plot isn’t quite strong enough, but Sean Byrne’s variation on the torture porn genre is bolder and more surprising than the lot for ‘going there’ in some scenes (not just gore-wise) and really sticking to its guns. Brent is involved in an auto accident in which he loses his father. We get one moment of Brent with a normal hairstyle and a smile, and then cut to after the accident, some time on, and he’s listening to heavy metal, has long ratty hair, and cuts himself. This would be hokey character dynamics in about 99% of films, but Byrne’s story and Xavier Samuel’s representation of this character don’t play it as anything other than the reality of the situation. Samuel is still a functioning almost adult, he has a hot girlfriend, he might be despondent but he isn’t irresponsible per se and isn’t played off as your typical long-haired teen. It’s a direct and graceful way to show us something about someone. Unfortunately for despondent-yet-nice Brent, he turns the wrong girl down for prom. She and her father kidnap him, tie him to a chair, and subject him to some intense depravity in a twisted prom re-enactment. And that’s pretty much it. There’s some cleverness to where it goes, and the final shot is pretty satisfying, but some of the attempts to tie subplots together are sort of pointless, and just exist to separate torture scenes. As mentioned, what really sells this, though, is that stuff actually *happens* to the leads. They get messed up. When you think someone will stop, they don’t. And because of the work Byrne puts in to trying to flesh out who these people are, it functions as more unnerving, or funny, or odd, or frightening, than just people hacking each other up.