Arthouse horror month with my wife continues with this Karyn Kusama movie, about a dude and his girlfriend going to the world’s most awkward dinner party with his ex and a bunch of friends and also some other people.

This is one of those movies where the slow burn of “what’s going on here, who are all these people and how do they relate to each other” and a kind of building unease are what the movie is all about, so I really can’t say much more than that.

The movie’s very effective at building that sense of unease, although tbh a lot of that is just due to abusing the soundtrack — take a perfectly ordinary scene of someone doing something exceedingly mundane but with dramatic lighting (say like washing a plate in the sink, with the only light coming from the light over the sink in an otherwise dark room), put minor-key violins on it, and the viewer is basically convinced you’re like five seconds away from jasons breaking out in a killing spree.

So I liked that part of the movie, by and large. It was a bit overwrought and I thought they could have stood to have made the characters a bit more lowkey instead of so emo, but it worked.

Once the paranoia and building tension resolved itself definitively, though, it was kinda okay wevs; fortunately the movie didn’t overstay itself at that point — it did what it had to do to wrap things up pretty quickly — but I still found myself thinking that it would have been a more effective movie if it had done something else, idk, left things more ambiguous somehow.

“Hey, could you take this slow-burn movie and make it a little bit more lowkey, plus remove the part at the end where stuff happens” is probably not a critique that, if followed, would have resulted in this movie being more popular, but… well, who knows, Diabolique seems to have held up pretty well, you know?

(Also, the opposite of that is Ready or Not, a movie that I started watching with my wife, but which dispensed with the opening “building tension” part inside of like 15 minutes, and moved on to a bunch of actiony stuff, which I find both unpleasantly tense but also somehow kinda dull. This was a lot better than that, to my tastes.)