Body Count • Existential Dread • Retribution Reels • Time Capsule
I grew up in rural America, where many of the people I have met would consider the middle of nowhere, and yet, for reasons that none of us could really explain, I still felt the need to lock the door. Car door, front door, back door, garage door…windows. We had never experienced a break-in, and I could never articulate it, other than that the middle of nowhere is the perfect place to commit a crime. In retrospect, my proclivity to lock doors very well may have been heavily influenced by my personal interest in horror and true crime. Granted, more than once I was accused of trying to hide something for locking my car in the driveway, but overall, I think my family just added it to my long list of “quirks,” a blatant dismissal of a survival instinct that didn't align with the perceived safety and comfortability afforded to rural White America. In the middle of nowhere, the absence of accountability is often mistaken for peace, and we are conditioned to believe that our environment is an inherent shield against the types of crimes that “only happen in the city.” My gravitation toward toxic outcasts, on the other hand, was undoubtedly shaped by characters like David (Mark Wahlberg) in the movie Fear (1996).
Existential Dread • Body Count • Retribution Reels Sometimes it’s easy to award points for character depth or plot continuity; other times, a film can do everything "right" and still fail to resonate. As I’ve mentioned [in previous reviews], The Cell (2000) utterly ruined how I gauge a legitimately "good" movie. The Girl Who Got Away (2021) is a prime example of a technically solid flick that nonetheless misses the mark of a cinematic masterpiece.
It’s not often that I find a genuinely decent horror movie on Netflix. Nothing against the platform, but until recently, their horror and horror-adjacent releases often felt geared toward a "Young Adult" demographic—relying on sanitized tropes and rudimentary character development. However, The Girl Who Got Away distinguishes itself through a more sophisticated psychological lens. |
Sheena MonsterThey/Them/Theirs 
Naming the things that society works hardest to ignore, to reclaim the humanity stripped by systemic deception.
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