The privilege
It left me with a rather weak impression. It is not one of those horrible films that make you angry from minute one, because it has pace, a premise of supernatural youth conspiracy and a few elements that could have been interesting. But it is also one of those Netflix proposals that begin with a certain curiosity and end up becoming a jumble of scares, trauma, cults, elites, medication, demons and predictable twists that never quite come together.
The idea was not bad: a boy from a wealthy family, marked by childhood trauma, begins to suspect that what surrounds him is not just anxiety, hallucination or psychological trouble, but something darker connected to his family, the private school and that world of privilege where everyone seems to know more than they say. There was material there for a fairly entertaining paranoid thriller, with rich teenagers, family secrets and a threat that mixes science, religion and horror.
The problem is that the film seems to want to be too many things at once. It wants to be supernatural horror, youth thriller, critique of elites, trauma story, medical conspiracy and demonic mystery. And since it does not choose well what it wants to be, it jumps from one idea to another without any of them having enough force. You can tell it is looking for something current and different, but often it only feels like a mixture of things already seen.
For me, the best part is in the opening stretches. That doubt about whether the protagonist is losing his mind or whether there really is something strange around him has a certain hook. The atmosphere of an expensive school, a family that looks perfect from the outside and rot beneath the surface also works. The film understands that privilege can be a golden cage, a place where everything is clean, ordered and protected, but where very murky pacts may also be hidden.
Even so, the horror itself is quite poor. There are unsettling images, the occasional unpleasant moment and a more or less effective scare, but it never becomes truly frightening. Many apparitions and supernatural signs feel more decorative than disturbing. The film wants us to feel threatened, but it almost always remains catalogue horror, correct in appearance and weak in impact.
The characters do not help much either. Finn could have been an interesting protagonist, but he remains somewhat flat, more dragged along by the plot than defined by it. His friends and allies fulfill their function, but rarely feel like complete people. The film needs them to investigate, suspect, run, discover and connect clues, but it does not always manage to make us care much about what happens to them.
I did like the idea of the adults and the elites as a threat a little more. That feeling that parents, doctors, institutions and powerful people are protecting a secret has strength. In that territory, the film could have been more poisonous: a story about how the privileged buy safety, youth, health or impunity at the expense of others. But it presents it in such a blunt and inelegant way that the social criticism ends up diluted among strange explanations and unsurprising twists.
There is also a clear script problem. The twists can be seen coming, the revelations do not surprise much and some scenes seem to exist only to push the protagonist toward the next clue. Instead of building an increasingly intense paranoia, the story becomes sillier as it goes on. Not silly in a fun way, but in that frustrating sense of a film that opens doors without really knowing how to close them.
The final stretch is where its seams show the most. What could have been a dark, delirious or genuinely unsettling ending becomes an accumulation of forced answers, chases and explanations that do not have the strength they should. The film wants to turn up the volume, but the more it explains, the less mystery remains; and the bigger the conspiracy seems to become, the less I believe it.
That said, I do not find it completely useless either. It has a reasonable running time, it can be watched without too much effort and, if you go in with low expectations, it can work as youth horror entertainment to pass the time. There are far more boring films in this same bag. Here, at least, there is a recognizable premise, some rhythm and a touch of madness that prevents it from being completely flat.
In the end, it remains for me a weak, uneven and very forgettable film, but not unbearable. It had an idea with possibilities, an attractive mixture of elite school, family conspiracy and supernatural horror, but it develops it in a way that is too predictable and confusing. It can be watched, yes, but it also falls apart scene by scene until it becomes little more than a poorly used promise.
The idea was not bad: a boy from a wealthy family, marked by childhood trauma, begins to suspect that what surrounds him is not just anxiety, hallucination or psychological trouble, but something darker connected to his family, the private school and that world of privilege where everyone seems to know more than they say. There was material there for a fairly entertaining paranoid thriller, with rich teenagers, family secrets and a threat that mixes science, religion and horror.
The problem is that the film seems to want to be too many things at once. It wants to be supernatural horror, youth thriller, critique of elites, trauma story, medical conspiracy and demonic mystery. And since it does not choose well what it wants to be, it jumps from one idea to another without any of them having enough force. You can tell it is looking for something current and different, but often it only feels like a mixture of things already seen.
For me, the best part is in the opening stretches. That doubt about whether the protagonist is losing his mind or whether there really is something strange around him has a certain hook. The atmosphere of an expensive school, a family that looks perfect from the outside and rot beneath the surface also works. The film understands that privilege can be a golden cage, a place where everything is clean, ordered and protected, but where very murky pacts may also be hidden.
Even so, the horror itself is quite poor. There are unsettling images, the occasional unpleasant moment and a more or less effective scare, but it never becomes truly frightening. Many apparitions and supernatural signs feel more decorative than disturbing. The film wants us to feel threatened, but it almost always remains catalogue horror, correct in appearance and weak in impact.
The characters do not help much either. Finn could have been an interesting protagonist, but he remains somewhat flat, more dragged along by the plot than defined by it. His friends and allies fulfill their function, but rarely feel like complete people. The film needs them to investigate, suspect, run, discover and connect clues, but it does not always manage to make us care much about what happens to them.
I did like the idea of the adults and the elites as a threat a little more. That feeling that parents, doctors, institutions and powerful people are protecting a secret has strength. In that territory, the film could have been more poisonous: a story about how the privileged buy safety, youth, health or impunity at the expense of others. But it presents it in such a blunt and inelegant way that the social criticism ends up diluted among strange explanations and unsurprising twists.
There is also a clear script problem. The twists can be seen coming, the revelations do not surprise much and some scenes seem to exist only to push the protagonist toward the next clue. Instead of building an increasingly intense paranoia, the story becomes sillier as it goes on. Not silly in a fun way, but in that frustrating sense of a film that opens doors without really knowing how to close them.
The final stretch is where its seams show the most. What could have been a dark, delirious or genuinely unsettling ending becomes an accumulation of forced answers, chases and explanations that do not have the strength they should. The film wants to turn up the volume, but the more it explains, the less mystery remains; and the bigger the conspiracy seems to become, the less I believe it.
That said, I do not find it completely useless either. It has a reasonable running time, it can be watched without too much effort and, if you go in with low expectations, it can work as youth horror entertainment to pass the time. There are far more boring films in this same bag. Here, at least, there is a recognizable premise, some rhythm and a touch of madness that prevents it from being completely flat.
In the end, it remains for me a weak, uneven and very forgettable film, but not unbearable. It had an idea with possibilities, an attractive mixture of elite school, family conspiracy and supernatural horror, but it develops it in a way that is too predictable and confusing. It can be watched, yes, but it also falls apart scene by scene until it becomes little more than a poorly used promise.
Mini Review: It left me with a rather weak impression. It is not one of those horrible films that make you angry from minute one, because it has pace, a premise of supernatural youth conspiracy and a few elements that could have been interesting. But it is also one of those Netflix proposals that begin with a certain curiosity and end up becoming a jumble of scares, trauma, cults, elites, medication, demons and predictable twists that never quite come...
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