Review of I Came By (2022) by Meritcoba — 17 Sep 2022

There is a market for low-budget movies like this thriller, but you need to add something crunchy to the mix to make it stand out, such as a well-written script, an original take, tense dialogue, interesting characters, and good pacing. I pick these examples on purpose because the movie is devoid of them. The basic story is so mundane that it baffles the mind. This script must have landed on someone's desk, and that someone must have given it the green light. I can only assume that there was some mistake with the original good script, and the wrong one was given the go-ahead. Or is Netflix's plight so dire that they can only get the mediocre ones?

In my mind, I see Netflix canvassing the universities for graduates hoping they get lucky. Perhaps they were inspired by Stalin's remark that quantity has a quality of its own.

And to drive the point home: there is nothing remarkable here, even though there could have been if the makers had just changed some parameters. One thing to take at heart is to invest in the protagonist and not swap him out halfway into the movie with another one. Or perhaps you could have considered making someone else the protagonist, like the mother. This would have created an interesting angle: the mother must learn from her son. Another piece of advice is that less is more. If you don't have the budget, why establish multiple protagonists? I go as far as that there are three. The worse aspect is that the movie feels overlong because it spends so much time on their backgrounds. And this would be fine if this was a social drama, but it isn't: it's a thriller. A thriller has the protagonist, the underdog, pitted against the superior antagonist, and the movie ends with their roles being reversed in a clever or unusual way. The film goes through the ropes but is never clever or unusual. Now to give you an example of what could have been done. The antagonist could be exposed by streaming the whole on the internet. This could have been foreshadowed by the son filming his break-ins and publishing them on the internet. Instead of the son, the mum will be the story's primary focus. Her son breaks into the antagonist's house and disappears. She has to find out what happens and then is up against the seemingly unassailable antagonist. And with the help of her son's friend, she chips away at the antagonist until he crumbles and falls. A few points.

1 There is one protagonist and it will be the mother.

2 What happens inside the mansion will be unclear until the end. There is footage, but it is distorted or unusable. This adds to the mystery. This is the old wisdom of not exposing the monster until the end. I would have omitted every scene inside the house. Instead, what happens in that house is something the mum observes from the outside. She calls the cops. They go in and come out. What has happened? She asks the cops; they tell her they didn't find anything. She learns that the antagonist is best buddies with the police chief. The low point for the mum would be that the antagonist uses his influence and connections to set the whole apparatus of law enforcement on her(including perhaps making her out to be a nutcase), which makes the antagonist untouchable and powerful. 3 The parent-child relation gets swapped. The son becomes his mother's teacher. 4 I would make the son become the father instead of the other guy(actually, I think he should be given a small role or be left out entirely). This creates conflict with the mother(you, dad? You can't even hold a job down for more than a week?) and perhaps with his pregnant girlfriend. (You have to stop these break-ins, you get to be a father now).

5 The mum is not tech savvy, but she learns from her son about making movies by watching and learning from his films. This can then be used to make her understand her son more. (For instance, he makes money and has a large following, so while he doesn't hold on to a regular job, he has one: being a streamer). 6 The antagonist gets exposed through his security system. These are just some ideas I came up with in an hour, and in my opinion, it would have led to a better script.