Tribeca Festival 2023 Review: “Bad Things” – An Unoriginal Mirroring of The Shining!
Starting off the horror series at the Tribeca Film Festival is Bad Things directed by Stewart Thorndike. Four friends spend a weekend at a remote hotel in the Northeast during the winter. With nobody else inhabiting the resort because of its closure, Ruthie invites her girlfriend Cal and their two other friends to spend the weekend and enjoy their time together. As horror movies go, this weekend turns out to be anything but peaceful when Ruthie’s emotions and thoughts begin to run rampant putting the other in danger.
Remote location horror films are typically fun even if they don’t break the glass ceiling. However, Bad Things was a film rooted in too much mirroring of the film The Shining that it had nothing new to give to the genre aside from obvious casting choices and a feminine touch. When a film can only be made because of the inspiration from another, it feels inauthentic and highly unoriginal. Paying homage to early filmmakers and films can be a respectful and fun element to a film but Bad Things is so obsessed with being the queer “The Shining” that it leaves nothing original for itself to work with.
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Rather than using another film to carry yours, it would seem taking an original idea and forming your themes around it would work a lot better than essentially copying elements and very specific details from a previous famous film. It became obvious that the filmmaker was not paying respect to the Stanley Kubrick’s classic, but instead decided to piggyback off of it in a way that makes it impossible to see how this film could have ever been made had The Shining not existed because she would have had no original content of her own to work with.
Bad Things takes too long to get going for a 83-minute film. This may work if the time was used to display a stronger relationship among the four female characters and build their story arcs. However, little connection was given by Thorndike for the audience to feel any genuine connection between these four girls or connection to them at all. Cal, who could have been one of the most interesting characters, was written as a lovestruck victim with so little strength in herself at all. Ruthie was not enjoyable to watch because of her disrespectful actions when more time should have been given to exploring the complicated relationship she had with her mother.
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Watching the film in its entirety gave me an awkward sense that the director herself didn’t even fully know what she was going for. Ruthie in the film clearly deals with psychological trauma and issues that induce hallucinations and make her experience situations that are likely not occurring in real time. However, that doesn’t then get to be an excuse for not having a clear direction for your film.
How a film decides to play out the plot can be a convoluted mess if the film warrants that type of treatment, however watching Bad Things wasn’t directorially clear in any of its themes because of its dependency on using the 1980 classic’s techniques and structure with a different message that was intended to come across. This is a messy film not only in its story but in its execution as well.
‘Bad Things’ Rating – 1.5/5
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