You Might Be the Killer

This is one of those concepts that probably sounded really great on paper, but in execution, gets garbled and loses its potency. You Might Be The Killer comes off like a satire of camp slashers, aiming for what feels like a middle ground between the genre-busting of Behind The Mask and the self-aware sensibilities of The Final Girls, but without going off the deep end of the meta diving board. 2/3’s of the movie is told via out of sequence flashbacks as the main character — running for his life in the middle of a camp massacre — calls his horror movie expert friend for advice on how to survive. The story is then told piecemeal, jumping all over the timeline for no discernible purpose. The final third catches up to real time and just becomes the third act of a slasher movie. Without giving away the twist, the movie’s premise hinges on telling the story from a bold, unique point of view, and I give it points for that. The kills are fine, if standard stuff (although the skull bifurcation was gnarly). And Alyson Hannigan is always fun, no matter what she does. Unfortunately, that bold point of view and the twist that fuels it also robs this movie of any tension whatsoever. I spent the runtime waiting for another twist to shake up the formula, but it doesn’t happen. This movie is committed to a course, and no heady premise will stand in its way of following the slasher playbook step by step. And because of the flashback format and the premise, the paper thin characterizations one sees in a slasher are even worse here. There are characters that are so inconsequential, they’re given no names and, during a point where the movie drops dead in its tracks to list the dead, referred to as “the skinny dippers”. The movie introduces the characters with on-screen name tags, but with the exception of maybe four, that is all you get. There is absolutely no reason to care about anybody, because the movie literally treats these characters as tally marks. And even the characters that are given time get nothing for development; the horror nerd friend is a friend on the phone who knows a lot about horror. The ex-girlfriend is unpleasant. The main character is the main character. It sounds like I’m griping about standard slasher tropes, but when a movie is trying to position itself outside the norm with a lofty concept, it has to do more. The Final Girls is a fantastic example, building relationships between the cast to give them depth beyond being meat sacks for the specter of death. YMBTK doesn’t have time for that. It doesn’t have room for that. It is too wrapped up with its amazing idea to do anything else, and that handicaps the movie’s possibilities. The end result is a movie too smart for its own good, and too unoriginal to be memorable outside of its one hook. It’s not outright bad, but it can’t get out of its own way to be anything better than average.