With family, one hopes for the best.
Things are looking up for Samara Weaving’s Grace; it’s the day of her marriage to Alex, heir to the Le Domas fortune, and this working class girl is ready to live the rich life. But the Le Domas family made their money in board games, so there’s a wedding night tradition involving the new family member playing a game with the rest of the family. Unfortunately for Grace, she draws the card that says “Hide & Seek,” and, in short, this means that the rest of the family has to kill her before dawn or fall victim to a gruesome family curse (that may or may not be real). I mean, it’s a hook to die for and this movie delivers the nasty, gory mayhem that its premise promises.
It’s a movie pitched somewhere around operatic in just about every way. The design of the estate where most of the movie takes place is fantastic, this towering Gothic mansion filled with secret passages and hidden death-traps. The cast is, by and large, fantastic. Henry Czerny, a stalwart character actor I feel like used to be in everything back in the nineties, is wonderful as the foppish patriarch of the family. Nicky Guadagni, Kristian Bruun & Elyse Levesque all turn in suitably over-the-top supporting performances and get lots of laughs. Melanie Scrofano is worthy of special note as the coke-sniffing daughter of the Le Domas family, a wired klutz who’s totally into the killing, but can’t quite get it right. Adam Brody is really wonderful as the black sheep son, Grace’s new brother-in-law; in a movie pitched a couple of notches above melodrama, he plays it like he’s in a melancholy indie and he brings a surprising amount of emotional weight to some of his scenes. I should mention that Andie MacDowell is another stalwart that I haven’t seen in ages and ages and she’s in this as the Le Domas matriarch, but, man, I had forgotten that, as famous as she once was, she’s really not a very good actress; I mean, she’s serviceable, but wooden sometimes. It’s a good character, but I kind of wish it’d been someone better in the role. But this is Samara Weaving’s movie and she just goes full-throttle. When the night starts, she’s still coiffed and made-up and a perfect picture of, well, grace in her beautiful wedding dress, but as the night goes off the rails, we watch as this perfect, beautiful, blonde woman just descends into complete madness and chaos. This is really a masterpiece of a movie. It delivers a lot of dark comedy, a lot of shocking violence, a lot of suspense and, ultimately, it’s both a satire on, and an explosion of rage toward, the ultra-rich and the cloistered worlds they live in. I’m really just pretty shocked at how great this movie is. It has about a hundred needles to thread and it manages to pull them all off. It’s the kind of bloody, raucous horror movie that is fun to see with an audience that will laugh and scream at all the right moments, but it also has some scenes, like one real knockout with Mark O’Brien as the unlucky groom, that really land emotionally in kind of dark and tragic ways. It manages to wring all the comedy it can out of the absurd premise but also use it as a springboard to get to some serious moments about the way families fall apart. It’s smartly-written, well-performed, beautifully directed and it boasts one of the most ferocious lead performances of the year with Samara Weaving’s star-making turn. Chase this one down; it’s a knock-out. 4 stars.
tl;dr – full-throttle horror delivers social commentary, emotional depth, dark comedy & shocking violence in a knock-out cocktail; Samara Weaving’s lead performance is astounding. 4 stars.