Guess Who

I just finished watching this on Tubi. It's about a man coming back home to visit his family, along with his wealthy fiancee. His family is super weird and his hometown takes part in a yearly ritual night of pranking. As bodies begin to appear, suspicions arise and secrets are laid bare.

Though unoriginal, it would have been okay as long as the film was made competently. Poorly made with below average acting, non existent cinematography, a lousy script and almost nothing of value beyond 2 decent kills.

It just makes zero sense and just continues to spiral out of control, completely blowing apart in the last act. None of the plot twists make even a little bit of sense. It's almost as if if the first half and last half were two different movies. The first half being a slasher and the 2nd being weird familial drama.

It was a major waste of time and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

I got so excited when I found out there's finally a Mummers horror movie! Unfortunately, Guess Who feels like a very flawed product of compromise, ultimately pleasing no one. The movie opens with a definition of Mummering, "a centuries old Christmas tradition, in which people disguise their identities, visit neighbors, and tell a riddle. The host tries to solve the riddle, and guess the identity of the mummer. One never knows who is under the mask." And that's a part of Mummering, sure. Nowhere in the description or promo for Guess Who is this movie described as a Mummers horror, yet the movie is very much centred completely around Mummering.

Guess Who is very, very banal, a generic PG slasher. The movie's misuse of Mummering was a missed opportunity to explore an interesting tradition with rich Pagan/folk roots. With the confines of that PG rating it would have been far more effective and scary if it was folk horror and/or supernatural. Instead, we get a forgettable, bland stinker slasher made egregious by its lost potential and appropriation of a Newfoundland and Labrador cultural tradition (without ever actually mentioning Newfoundland and Labrador). Though right from the opening minutes, The Mummer costumes are great and accurate (apart from the central Mummer who is in plain, drab masked slasher attire) and specific to the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador: the brightly colored doilies and linens, false faces, and bras worn overtop of clothing. But then we see proud displays of American flags????? So, we're not Mummering in Newfoundland and Labrador??? The movie quickly becomes an undisclosed American town, using the overcompensating American flag waving short-hand of so many movies filmed in Canada. I am so tired of seeing movies that are obviously in Canada yet becomes somewhere else, USA. Sure, it was funny when Jason attacked people on Vancouver's Skytrain in Jason Takes Manhattan but let's put this to rest. This has the added crime of wanting to take place in Newfoundland and Labrador (misusing its specific Mummering folk traditions, note that Philadelphia is the only U. S. city with Mummering and it is very different and more ostentatious there), but filmed by Canadians in Montreal (though nondescript enough to not make it look Montreal specific) while taking place in an unnamed American town and using lots of Canadian funding. Oh, and as of this writing, it's only available to viewers in the USA, on Tubi. I love Tubi but this is the first Tubi Original that I've seen. Guess Who could have taken full advantage of Newfoundland and Labrador's dramatic landscape: the crashing waves of The Atlantic Ocean upon the rocks surrounded by fog and snow. The Mom character in Guess Who even makes a Jigs dinner, a traditional Newfoundland meal, for everyone. The actor playing that character makes a dreadful attempt at a Newfoundland accent: was noted Newfoundland actor Mary Walsh not available? She probably didn't want to do this. Looking up the writers of Guess Who, it turns out that they'd previously done a remake of the Canadian horror movie Terror Train (also a Tubi original) and their remake actually starred Mary Walsh! This makes me wonder if Guess Who was more accurate in its early script drafts and actually took place in Newfoundland (as opposed to 'Canadian city filling in for unnamed American town') and if they wrote that part for Mary Walsh until the U. S. suits stepped in.

This movie's Mummers do go to houses but instead of having people ask questions to try and guess their identities, they borrow more freely from the Batman tradition and pretend that they're The Riddler asking questions like "What has teeth but doesn't eat?" (a comb) Mummering in Newfoundland and Labrador is very much a community event where people who haven't much money can participate, it's downright subversive and socialist, even thumbing its nose at the wealthy. In this movie, the only sympathetic characters are the rich people.

For a movie called Guess Who that was filmed in Canada by Canadians, it should have been the true story of the fake band pretending to be the Canadian classic rock band The Guess Who.

Much like 2015's Krampus, a horror comedy movie that is neither funny nor scary, Guess Who gets the tradition so wrong to the detriment of everything (I highly recommend the "Krampus And The Old Dark, Christmas" history book). If Guess Who had just removed the Mummers then it'd be just a generic PG slasher but instead it's a generic PG slasher full of inaccuracies and missed opportunities and evil intent. I hope one day someone makes a good Mummers folk horror movie.

I highly recommend Dale Jarvis' book on the history of Mummering in Newfoundland and Labrador. In terms of folk-horror that is Mummers adjacent, there is an incredible National Film Board short from 2021 about a Labrador Inuit tradition called Nalujuk Night directed by Jennie Williams. Nalujuk Night is a verite documentary that is effectively scary, accurate, and fun! Real life folk horror that borders on the supernatural.

This movie started so well. I was hooked and the first 45 mins i was hopeful that this was going to be a good movie. Then it just went down hill so quickly that the second half of the movie is terrible and then twist and ending very sad and depressing. I know you don't watch horror movies expecting to be happy but you do expect the characters to make sense even the slightest. The movie ends and you honestly feel miserable. The murderer has motives which are so inconceivable it would have been better if it was just random.

I feel like it just had a poorly written script that wanted to tell too many stories so combined them all to make one really bad depressing one. Would not watch again.

Visiting his family for the holidays, a couple not only looking to celebrate their current engagement but also to partake in a long-standing community tradition known as Mummer's Day but when she starts to believe the celebrations are hiding something more devious tries to get away before it affects her.

This was a highly enjoyable effort. One of the finest aspects here is the incredibly solid setup that provides this with a fun central storyline to play out. The main focus is on the game they play in the community which seems like the kind of feature that a group of people would bring up and bring up with those around them including the need for dressing up, the ceremonial masks, and the joke that sets everything in motion that all comes together into a solid enough feature here. That this is brought up in the middle of a solid secondary storyline where his return to the family and the cordial unease felt where he still feels guilty for leaving and having access to money through her that no one else in the community can match makes for a great time as he tries to make amends while they poke at him for it but not outright demand access to funds. This keeps them firmly likable while still creating a bit of a strain on everything which is the perfect tone here. This also allows the more traditional genre setups to emerge rather nicely here. The fact that everyone is there wearing masks and wandering around in disguises as the point for the whole experience is lamp-shaded nicely when she points out the potential for a maniac to take advantage of it all to do something and get away with it, which then turns into the films' scenes of the killer wandering through the celebrations unaware. Assuming that there's something wrong but not sure who it is due to a series of pranks instead of the real culprit, there's a nice bit of suspense generated here with the strange figure going around dealing out some brutal and graphic deaths that are handled rather nicely. As the finale features a series of twists and counterreveals for what's going on that takes things into a genuinely unexpected direction that has some intriguing action here, these are enough to give this one a lot to like about it. There are some factors here that bring this one down. The main drawback here is the sluggish pacing which keeps much more of a focus on the family relationship and the exploits of the celebrations rather than bring about more of a straightforward slasher effort. This takes until the hour mark to start bringing more of a focus on that matter, where even though there are stalking scenes here with his wandering through the crowd and picking off stragglers nothing happens to build off this kind of setup. That the final half turns into a bizarre kidnapping plot that's quite a bit removed from the kind of stalk-and-slash that this one could've been involving a killer going around the festivities trying to knock off a group of revelers is the other big factor here where it becomes something completely different from the starting point and isn't as interesting as the rest of the material that came before. This twist ends up doing a lot here and holds the film down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

Guess Who sees a newly engaged couple return to his downturned poor community to visit his family for Christmas. There's a tradition in this trailer community of Mummers, wearing masks and telling puns for people to pass. In addition, Mummers also try to scare people and pull pranks. (Solid, fun Christmas activities, no?)

This plotting isn't fleshed out more than this though. There is a stalker killing people. And there's a twist. There is a subtext of rich versus the poor that comes around for twist.

And the film ultimately ends with this basic idea of a plot. And a twist. And ends. There isn't much more than this. It may be filmed adequately, and the acting is okay. But, there isn't much to the total product at the end.

It's okay to watch, just not exciting, or not much to get from it.