"On the surface, this teen-courting, genre-savvy Irish-Canadian horror effort looks like the kind of project ushered into production after the Philippou brothers' cursed-artefact chiller Talk to Me cleared up at the box office. However, rather than suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy relocate us to an autumnal, Springsteen-ready North American steeltown, where artsy high-schooler Chrys (Dafne Keen) inherits the locker of the star basketballer we've just seen flambeed in a prologue."
"The deadly doodad she finds there is a skull-shaped Aztec whistle with either summon the dead or summon your dead (there's some linguistic quibbling) inscribed on the side. Naturally she puts it back, and everybody lives happily ever after. I kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in the pummelling Antipodean predecessor, but whistleblowing soon makes everyone's worst fears about dying literal."
"British director Hardy has far more fun here than he did with 2018's mechanical franchise entry The Nun. He runs with a solid in-joke naming objects, places and Nick Frost's doomed teacher Mr Craven after noted horror directors and pushes a sequence involving a labyrinthine straw maze, surely beyond the actual resources of a small town harvest festival, towards the pleasingly surreal."
Corin Hardy and writer Owen Egerton relocate a teen-focused horror to an autumnal North American steeltown where artsy high-schooler Chrys inherits a star basketballer's locker. She discovers a skull-shaped Aztec whistle inscribed with a phrase that either summons the dead or summons your dead; blowing it triggers increasingly literal, Final Destination–like deaths. The film foregrounds sympathy for insecure, troubled teens and tenderly observes courtship, including Chrys's attempts to come out to classmate Ellie. Hardy injects playful in-jokes, surreal set pieces like a labyrinthine straw maze, and bloodily inventive kills, though some narrative strands, such as a loose-end preacher, remain underintegrated.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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