Review: ‘Bad Things’ tips its hat to previous genre fare

You’ve got to respect a filmmaker who respects the past. What’s most evident in filmmaker Stewart Thorndike’s horror/drama Bad Things are the clear lines that can be drawn not only to The Shining but French extremist film High Tension and a little-known ‘80s gem called Curtains. These threads get woven together into a bloody and tense picture that never gets lost in its own self-made mausoleum of film references. It simply exists as an amalgamation with its own precisely-sheared vision.

Ruthie (Glow’s Gayle Rankin) returns to her family’s snow-crusted hotel, which she inherited from her late grandmother. The walls seem to breathe on their own, with Thorndike utilizing the space as though it were a character on its own. Frames fill up, even when there’s nothing there. Shots linger, and the camera pans over an empty room. These quiet moments crawl under the skin as much as the bombastic ones, particularly when the screaming starts.

Ruth tugs along her girlfriend Cal (Barbie’s Hari Nef) and friend Maddie (Rad Pereira) for a weekend rendezvous. Thorndike stretches these relationship dynamics, tossing in Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), the outlier of the group, as an exploration into queer friendships. Fran’s presence is merely out of pity, as she mistakenly believed she had cancer, Maddie reveals. What begins as a much-needed getaway unravels into a bizarre fever dream.

Paranormal happenings begin to take over the hotel. Fran spots a dead family having a late breakfast in the dining hall and then later notices a pair of joggers circling the property. The group brushes off these sightings as nothing more than hallucinations. But that’s the least of their problems. A masked, hoodie-wearing killer descends upon the hotel and stalks the hallways – each character contending with their own sense of reality.

Thorndike twists the psychological screws ever-so-slightly. It’s just enough to tighten the skin over your face. Bad Things takes its time, revving up only in the last 20 minutes. It’ll surely be an endurance test for some – and you begin to wonder what the payoff will be if there even will be one. While the finale is ultimately earned, you’re left feeling as though Thorndike could (and should) have pushed the envelope a bit more. You tune in for the blood and you stay around for Rankin’s absolutely nutty performance.

Bad Things streams on Shudder this Friday (August 18).

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