Don’t Move, currently one of the Top 10 movies on Netflix, has a crackerjack premise for a thriller: A woman on her own in a remote area meets a seemingly friendly man who turns out to be a psychotic killer, and injects her with a paralysis agent that will gradually (and temporarily) take away her physical faculties, giving him terrifying control of her body. Now she has mere minutes to do whatever she can to escape him before the drug takes effect – and/or stall for time until after the drug wears off.
As excitingly gimmicky as that sounds, it may also ring with familiarity, in any number of ways: Because women in genre movies are so often meeting friendly-seeming guys who turn out to be malicious right around the 12-minute mark; because the Crank movies also use a bodily form of a ticking clock sending their hero on a desperate mission; because the title Don’t Move sounds a lot like Don’t Breathe, another thriller of confinement produced by Sam Raimi, who also produced this one; and because Don’t Move was made the directorial team of Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, recalling how the two-man team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods also wrote the original, intimately scaled Quiet Place and made the upcoming small-cast thriller Heretic.
But moreover, Don’t Move may sound familiar because since the streaming boom, there have been a lot of small-cast, isolated-location thrillers where a woman has to think fast and act faster to wriggle out of danger. The closest to this one is probably Alone, wherein a woman is stalked on the highway and eventually pursued through the woods, much like what happens in Don’t Move (there’s even a knock-out drug), but in a different order. There are plenty more, though, that feel like spiritual companions even if the details are vastly different: Netflix also made Oxygen, a sci-fi thriller about a woman trapped in a cryogenic chamber with her oxygen depleting. Hulu has become a major provider of this subgenre with Significant Other, a woodsy sci-fi movie with an alien-invasion twist on a domestic thriller; No One Will Save You, another close-POV alien-invasion movie with the added gimmick of remaining dialogue-free throughout the film; and No Exit, where a woman stuck at a rest stop stumbles upon a kidnapping plot.
Not all of these movies are precisely the same. All of them are at least diverting, which is the bar Don’t Move clears; some of them are exactingly well-made, like Alone. But still: That’s a lot of mainstream movies that play somewhere between knock-off of Gravity and pared-down slasher film, isn’t it? And Gravity came out over a decade ago; why do these movies make it seem like it was the biggest sensation of 2019?
Some of it, of course, is sheer practicality. None of these movies could have been that expensive to make. Don’t Move has about three major speaking roles, a handful of one-scene characters, and a lot of woods. That’s about the size of its various brethren; No One Will Save You has a few more locations, No Exit has a larger cast, but they’re all movies that ultimately feel modest in their aims. They also make sense as streaming projects. Direct-to-streaming movies often falter by either fitting too comfortably into the TV-movie paradigm, or fitting uncomfortably alongside genuine big-screen blockbusters – like “big” movies compressed and algorithm-ized into your home theater. But it’s entirely possible for movies like Oxygen or Don’t Move to benefit from small-screen intimacy while still looking polished enough to pass muster as a “real” movie. Friday-night thrillers for audiences who can’t necessarily hire a sitter every time they want to watch a new movie is just about a perfect use for streaming originals.
But there’s another way these movies feel especially appropriate to the streaming era: They all have something of an isolationist streak. That’s not to say they advocate for shunning human interaction; many of them, like Don’t Move, have a sequence where a stranger turns out to be not a figure of surprise menace but genuine kindness – though you can often guess what happens to these helpful strangers in the end. Often, the lead character has isolated herself due to some kind of trauma: the Gravity-like loss of a child in Don’t Move; the loss of a spouse to suicide in Alone; the death of a friend in No One Will Save You. Then the unexpected confrontation places them in a fight for their life, pushing past the numbness or despair, forcing their survival instincts to kick in.
Notably, though, that fight happens within their isolation. It has to; that’s the gimmick. But as elemental and satisfying as this formula can be, there’s also something weirdly tidy about it, a neatness and clarity that can – at times – feel reductive of the grieving experiences they’re often attempting to portray. Maybe that’s just it: The dead, in these constructions, are so compartmentalized, included in the narrative to be tastefully revealed at just the right time, and then shoved to back of mind as the thrills kick in, and maybe brought back around for a cruel taunt or a moment of last-minute inspiration, that in aggregate they seem like checkboxes on a screenwriter’s outline.
These movies are also particularly readable as pandemic projects, of course, in both the COVID-practicality of the productions (which must have looked attractive in the early 2020s, as filmmakers slowly and cautiously returned to work) and in their eventual consumption from couches, as viable alternative to out-of-the-house moviegoing that were desperately needed for several years. There’s nothing wrong with any of this; it’s kind of cool, actually, to see a whole class of modest, largely well-crafted thrillers emerge from technical and social limitations. After several years, though, the constraints have begun to seem more obligatory than clever, more pacifying than thought-provoking. M. Night Shyalaman has stuck with smaller-scale thrillers in his self-financing era, and they don’t feel nearly so canned. Look at Trap, a movie that relocates confinement, counterintuitively but cleverly, to a massive concert attended by thousands, twining together parental anxiety and perverse identification with its bad-guy protagonist.
Don’t Move, by contrast, doesn’t contain any particular insight about the grieving process; it’s easy to imagine, with the vagueness of its details (like a lot of supposedly parent-centric movies, it doesn’t even seem sure what age its main kid is supposed to be), that it might be actively irritating to an actual grieving parent. The challenge of the subgenre – the terrifying imperative to fight for yourself, or else – has flipped into a kind of reassurance that you can work it all out with the right bootstrap-tugging resilience. Watch too many of these appealingly bare-bones thrillers, and you start to see pain and terror stripped down to the comfort and repetitin of a metronomic beat.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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