With its very modern sensibilities and a certain level of artistic ambition, Those Who Walk Away has a few decent moments. Then again, the pitfalls of ambition over substance are written all over this (ostensibly) haunted house movie, with the main effect being that, despite some strong visuals and moments of atmosphere, it labours under being very, very underwritten overall.
As life rolls by, a young man called Max (Booboo Stewart, of Twilight fame) waits nervously for his first date with a girl he’s met online. It is, for him, a small return to normal life, having taken care of his mother for the past year. He spends a while chatting to a friend on the phone while he waits for her to arrive – more anon – but the girl, Avery (Scarlett Sperduto) soon turns up, and they begin to talk. A lot. About all that usual pillow talk stuff like enablers, incels, motivations, trauma – that kind of thing. They arrive at the venue for their date – a local cinema – and god only knows what these two bright young things would have made of their chosen screening of The Evil Dead, but sadly for them, a bomb scare (!) means the film can’t go ahead. Avery, who apparently works at said cinema, seems strangely unconcerned by this.
Never mind; they head to a bar instead, where things progress in mere minutes from a buzzword-heavy conversation to her draping herself all over him, and then Avery has a new idea: let’s head to an allegedly haunted house nearby. Incredibly, when they get there, despite it being abandoned years before, the electric’s still on; metered electric in this country is off the minute you’re through your emergency credit. Taking advantage of the improbable light, Avery tells Max the story of a spectre called ‘Rotcreep’ which is said to be attached to the house. Rotcreep requires a regular victim, or else he’ll…or else he’ll break out of the house somehow. It wasn’t too clear, but Max seems a little uncomfortable with the yarn, and he wants to leave. He’s about to feel worse, however.
Horror fans will no doubt spot where this is going, especially once some similarities to a certain other, successful indie horror from 2014 make themselves known – although the film is very loosely based on an Ursula Le Guin short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, rather than explicitly on any film. The Le Guin story is a vague, philosophical piece of work, and at least in that, the film is little different. It begins to reach for some stylistically quirky, surreal moments once our characters are in/around the house, and you wouldn’t deny that some of these scenes are nicely lit and shot, but having filled the first act of the film with talking, talking, talking, it feels like a hell of a jolt. So the surreal elements feel rather muddled and tacked on; horror aside, though, and before we get anywhere near horror at all, the first part of the film offers an interesting glimpse into a version of college-age chit-chat and conversational priorities and, as the director was born in 1988, I can’t even assume that he’s got it wrong due to being on the wrong side of the generation gap. The issue with all this is that first impressions of the few characters on offer are not particularly compelling; the script heaves under its own weight, right from the opening chat between Max and his supportive pal. They wade through an awful lot of abstract nouns and mores, and I certainly don’t envy the actors trying to flesh out this oddball dynamic, before following it into the depths of a haunted house which comes complete with its own, new mythos.
‘Rotcreep’ is a bold attempt at creating a wholly new entity, and credit is always due for making such an attempt; sadly, having talked its way into abstraction, the film then clams up entirely and offers us nothing by way of exposition and as such, Rotcreep is rather a wasted opportunity. He figures but little in the film, and feels underused. There simply isn’t enough here to either endear us to the central players, make us understand them, or sweep us up in the story, of which several intended symbolic readings unfortunately passed me by. Those Who Walk Away is a film very much of two disparate, surprisingly lightweight parts which struggle to fit well with one another. As a piece of entertainment, it is rife with difficulties.
Those Who Walk Away (2022) is available from today, 11th February 2022 in theatres and on VOD.