You’re Next (2011).

2/16/2022

Directed by Adam Wingard

Written by Simon Barrett

Starring Sharni Vinson, Joe Swanberg, AJ Bowen, and some pretty scary masks

The Stage.

A family heads to their summer home in the middle of nowhere to celebrate mom and dad’s 35th anniversary. The gathering is interrupted by a few madmen wearing animal masks and all hell breaks loose.

The Review.

I haven’t seen this film since I watched it on a plane ten years ago and it’s movies like this that make me thankful I have a short “movie-memory” because I only remembered a few small pieces of it (like the blender…oof).

After a very well done opening murder, we get to the crux of the film - a gathering at a huge mansion in the middle of the woods. There are a bunch of people who come to celebrate this anniversary of the parents Aubrey and Paul, which - as I’m watching it - made me think that the body count was going to be immense. The first to arrive are their son Crispian and his Australian girlfriend Erin. Next is his big brother Drake and his wife Kelly. Then their daughter Aimee and her boyfriend Tariq, and finally, their other son Felix and his mysterious girlfriend Zee.

The strength of You’re Next lies in its characters and the way those characters subvert typical genre expectations. The core of this is Sharni Vinson’s character Erin. In a typical horror film, the ‘final girl’ is either running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off for the whole film or, in the last third of the film, finally musters up the strength to fight back. It’s a tried and true formula we’ve seen in horror films for decades. In You’re Next, when the shit hits the fan, Erin jumps into survival mode feet first. Close the windows, grab something sharp, know your exits, set up traps, and when you have a bad guy down, you bash his fucking brains in until you know he’s dead. It’s a refreshing change of pace for a horror “damsel” and this switch almost makes it feel like a thrilling action film vs. a true horror picture.

The movie is really well made. It was shot mostly with handheld cameras to get you into the action. Sometimes this bothers me, it didn’t here. I also thought the sound design was great. From thumps on the floor to the crushing of broken glass, everything sounds fantastic. The set design is really cool and we get a decent knowledge of the space (although the house appears a lot bigger from the outside than what we actually get to see on-screen). The character design of the intruders is really great too - these black militia outfits with blank, white animal masks was very unsettling. And what’s a horror film without gore? This film has a big body count, and some of them die in pretty brutal ways. Axes to the head, throats cut, arrows, knives, there are plenty of creative deaths here.

The End.

You’re Next isn’t going for a serious tone - it’s having fun with it’s premise, something that is terribly apparent once a blender enters the mix. You’ll probably see some of the twists coming, but it’s so much fun that you probably won’t care. It successfully plays with your expectations of a home invasion movie and blends horror, action, and traps into a fulfilling hour and a half.