The story is actually pretty silly. A group of eight friends are having a party at one couple's home. That couple have only just moved into the house a couple of months before. Unknown to them, the previous owners of the house were a completely dysfunctional criminal family. One night, fleeing from the police, the family arrives back at their own house and take the eight hostage, looking for money that they claimed had been being sent to the house for them.
The story was standard home invasion stuff. There was nothing especially interesting about it. There's a lot of violence and a lot of blood. People get hurt and people get humiliated. Standard stuff. What makes this rise above other movies with a similar story, though, is the study of group dynamics involved.
There is of course the dynamic of the dysfunctional family. The three kids have an overbearing, demanding mother who insists on being in total control of their lives and has kept them isolated, allowing them no friends and home schooling them to keep them isolated. She's devoted to them - and they are to her - but in an obsessive, unbalanced kind of way that leads to a tragically sad and hopeless family who have no concern for anyone but themselves.
More interesting was the look at the dynamic between the eight friends who find themselves as the objects of this nightmare. I suppose that when faced with any kind of crisis, a group can move in two directions: they either pull together and support each other, or they fall apart and turn on each other. In this story, it was the latter that occurred. Few of the eight came across as noble, or even as particularly good friends. They were selfish and they allowed fear to control them. It became very much a "look out for number one" type of environment, to the point at which you weren't sure if couples really cared much about each other, and where friends trying to kill each other became totally unsurprising.
I enjoyed the group dynamic portrayal very much. It was well done, and - in spite of it being set in the context of a far-fetched movie - it was surprisingly believable. Frankly, the last scene of the movie isn't necessary. It takes an already far-fetched movie to yet another unfortunate extreme in "far-fetchedness!" That aside, though, this was a surprisingly exciting and relatively interesting movie that doesn't just go over the well-worn "home invasion" plot. (7/10)
The story was standard home invasion stuff. There was nothing especially interesting about it. There's a lot of violence and a lot of blood. People get hurt and people get humiliated. Standard stuff. What makes this rise above other movies with a similar story, though, is the study of group dynamics involved.
There is of course the dynamic of the dysfunctional family. The three kids have an overbearing, demanding mother who insists on being in total control of their lives and has kept them isolated, allowing them no friends and home schooling them to keep them isolated. She's devoted to them - and they are to her - but in an obsessive, unbalanced kind of way that leads to a tragically sad and hopeless family who have no concern for anyone but themselves.
More interesting was the look at the dynamic between the eight friends who find themselves as the objects of this nightmare. I suppose that when faced with any kind of crisis, a group can move in two directions: they either pull together and support each other, or they fall apart and turn on each other. In this story, it was the latter that occurred. Few of the eight came across as noble, or even as particularly good friends. They were selfish and they allowed fear to control them. It became very much a "look out for number one" type of environment, to the point at which you weren't sure if couples really cared much about each other, and where friends trying to kill each other became totally unsurprising.
I enjoyed the group dynamic portrayal very much. It was well done, and - in spite of it being set in the context of a far-fetched movie - it was surprisingly believable. Frankly, the last scene of the movie isn't necessary. It takes an already far-fetched movie to yet another unfortunate extreme in "far-fetchedness!" That aside, though, this was a surprisingly exciting and relatively interesting movie that doesn't just go over the well-worn "home invasion" plot. (7/10)