Review of A Horrible Way to Die (2010) by Chris B — 27 Nov 2011

Sometimes there are horror films wherein the villain is exactly the real life horror. In Adam Wingard's A Horrible Way to Die that villain is addiction.

Amy Seimetz plays Sarah, a girl with a harrowing back story. Through flashbacks, the audience learns that Sarah has been unknowingly dating a serial killer (AJ Bowen). Once she finds out the truth, she is able to put her lover behind bars and leave without a trace, but the guilt of being so brutally betrayed builds up inside her so much that she turns to alcohol to make herself forget. She's decided to battle her addiction and try to regain some sort of control over her life. Meanwhile, Sarah's serial killer boyfriend Garrick has broken out of prison. His motive is clear. To find and seek Sarah out.

But like Sarah, Garrick is a slave to addiction, an addiction to killing. No better scene shows this than when he kidnaps a young woman and has her drive him through a police barricade. Once they successfully get through, the girl pleads with him to let her go as he promised, but the next scene shows him walking around the car, the girl stabbed to death inside. Wingard's use of restraint to show the murder emphasises that the focus of this sequence is not the act of murder but how Garrick feels before and after he commits the act.

Many audiences have complained about the shooting style: a marriage of nausea causing shots that constantly move in and out of focus. I have to agree with these complaints. No matter how much you attempt to maintain focus on a scene, you can be quickly taken out of it as the camera moves for almost no reason and you have to wait until it stabilizes so you can get back to following the action. It's a very bad visual decision.

However, this shooting style may not be enough to make you completely write off this otherwise thematically complex and very well written film. This isn't a typical horror film. It's very character driven and it often skips over the brutal killing scenes. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett are a filmmaking team to watch out for in the coming years. A Horrible Way to Die will hopefully work out your brain more so than your eyes.