Bad Match Review: The dangers of internet dating are revealed as womaniser Harris starts dating the slightly off-kilter Riley.
Bad Match Review
In the wave of Friend Request, Unfriended, and Ratter, films that have all explored the horror of social media, there’s clearly a market for a film such as Bad Match. The film offers a new slant, one with a smaller body count, that analyses the modern dating arena, asking whether love can exist in this new climate.
In the last few years the world of dating has changed dramatically. Rather than going to bars and such to find potential suitors, many people have replaced this ritual with internet dating sites and apps. The most prevalent of those is of course Tinder, and it’s a Tinder-like app that causes all kind of chaos in Bad Match. Harris (Jack Cutmore-Scott) works hard at his job in marketing, but plays even harder out of the office. He spends his days trawling his dating app for women, and his nights dating those women. Clearly afraid of commitment, he’s more than happy with his bachelor lifestyle. Then he ‘matches’ with Riley (Lili Simmons), a beautiful firecracker, and it soon becomes apparent that he may have bitten off more then he can chew. Riley isn’t one of Harris’ usual conquests and isn’t content with being forgotten about after the one night.
Bad Match Review
Written and directed by David Chirchirillo, the writer of the brilliant Cheap Thrills, Bad Match is a fantastic modern take on the perils of the dating game. It perfectly skewers this current trend of men using dating apps purely to further their self-gratification, and could very much be read as a cautionary tale. It’s a story that everyone can relate too, we’ve all been either a Harris or a Riley (to some degree) at one point or another and that familiarity of the situation brings the audience on board. As events unravel the plot goes to some dark places and we lose some of that reality, but it is a movie after all.
Bad Match Review
Bad Match belongs to Jack Cutmore-Scott and Lili Simmons. As Harris, Cutmore-Scott creates a protagonist who is charismatic and narcissistic, an all too familiar personality mix in this day and age. He handles Harris’ spiral brilliantly and adds just a touch of Patrick Bateman to the performance. Playing against him you have Simmons as wildcat Riley. She could have so easily become the stereotypical scorned woman, but Simmons plays her more intelligently and to perfection. Anyone who has seen her in television show Banshee knows that she can play that ‘timid on the outside, ferocious on the inside’ role beautifully. Here Riley is slightly nicer and better adjusted to society, but there’s always a hint of danger to her character. The chemistry is strong between them, and they both play their parts so well that, towards the end as revelations are slowly uncovered, it’s kinda hard to decide which one of these two is the victim and which one is the player. It’s great to see such an even playing field for both sexes, usually things would be much more black and white and therefore boring. There’s more than enough to keep the audience engaged.
Fresh, clever, and ever so slightly twisted, Bad Match offers a modern take on the one-night-stand-gone-bad story, one that is sure to get everyone talking. We’ve had the rom-com, we’ve had the black comedy, Bad Batch is like throwing both into a blender, the results a dark and tasty fresh look at the world around us.
Bad Match review by Kat Hughes, August 2017.
Bad Match is currently playing as part of the Horror Channel Frighfest 2017 programme.
