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Everything from even the premise of Wounds is absurd. Armie Hammer stars as Will, a bartender that spends his nights fixing people drinks in the local joint; when an incident occurs one night involving some underage kids, he finds that one of them misplaced their phones. Taking it for safekeeping, things start to go awry when he begins receiving texts about a demonic entity that is coming after him and finds his sanity slowly dwindling further away from him.
The thing is: given the talent aboard, Wounds should stand out as one of the year’s best horror films – a promising filmmaker, a solid cast and a unique and fun premise are some key ingredients. It’s massively disappointing then that the result is anything but. A frustratingly paint-by-numbers horror, steeped in genre cliches, that is so confused by its on identity is what we get instead. The film doesn’t know what it wants to be, or where it wants to go; the story and tone are shifting constantly in a manner that feels unnecessary and jarring and the whole thing is just getting more and more ridiculous as it goes on – so much so that the logic in the screenplay starts contradicting itself and making no sense whatsoever. But the worst aspect of all this: the film is trying to take itself seriously. Despite the increasing absurdity, director Babak Anvari (Under The Shadows) tries to play it off quite straight and purposeful – causing it to be even more inane and laughable.
The scares are painfully bland; Anvari does little to orchestrate tension and horror that is meaningful, instead opting to craft scares that are conventional and nonsensical – a lot of heightened imagery is used in the hopes of adding layers to the fear but it just doesn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the film. He does manage to get competent performances from his cast though; Hammer, giving a very committed turn, is the only reason this film remains as watchable as it is. Zazie Beetz and Johnson are also fine, albeit just wasted.
A film that’s more self-aware of itself and assured in its lunacy. In the end, Wounds reeks of contrivance and is so bizarrely written and realised that the result is anything but scary or memorable. If anything, the result is funny – hilarious, even. But it’s at the film’s expense.
Wounds will be released on 18th October.
