Review of Vile (2011) by Jacob G — 06 Oct 2012

If you're going to watch people doing violent things to each other to escape the evil clutches of an entity, Vile isn't a half-bad way to spend that time. Movies like Saw and Hostel rank higher on the storyline level, but Vile does some things well. The best thing it does is keeping a lot of the actual violence off-screen or otherwise masked--which oddly increases the impact by making us focus on the other people involved. Indeed, this is a movie marked by the people and their interactions. As we empathize and identify we suddenly become complicit in the bloodlust.

But just like the people in the movie, we do not get off scott-free.