Review of Horns (2013) by Richard L — 16 Mar 2015

Sorry, Netflix, this is the rare movie you didn't get quite right in your recommendation to me.

"Horns" is about a young man accused of murdering his girlfriend. He is not yet in jail for the crime but the town and media have already decided he is guilty. What happened that night plays out in flashbacks from the perspective of multiple characters, leading to a rather predictable outcome. Along the way, though, Ignatius, played by Daniel Radcliffe, angers God with escalating blasphemy and debauchery and ends up the next morning with horns and the ability to make people tell the truth.

It all sounds good on paper, I guess, but in this film it results in problems with tone. Is this a drama, a dark comedy, a gory revenge flick? None of the tones manage to braid very well, while the central relationship told in flashback is too dilute and spread out in the movie to make the characters sympathetic enough. Radcliffe is pretty good in the film, but even he cannot manage the unevenness.

My major problem with the film, however, is the plot, and a woman being brutalized to give the male character his character arc. The screenplay mines this for sentiment and melodrama, and when the violence is depicted it is brutal and awful. In the last act, the movie becomes abruptly and gratuitously violent, as if the Peter Jackson who made "Bad Taste" stepped in to film a scene.

And then there is the ending and the last voice-over, reflecting yet another strange tonal change that results in something like the end of "Titanic" meets "Twilight.".