"Open 24 Hours" is a gory one-location, slasher-like, mystery-in-delusion indie horror, working decreasingly well on those levels in that order. Overall, it proved to be an all-around okay fourth horror feature from Padraig Reynolds, an indie director who seems to love the genre and his role in it.
Mary (Vanessa Grasse) has been through a lot, having escaped from the life together with a serial killer, and is now trying to start anew, still fighting trauma, paranoia and delusions. She lands a well necessary job in a remote gas station as a nightshift clerk, a place where all that can go wrong, will go wrong. The story, written to twist and turn, in the end turns out rather conventional as most of theories that came to mind took a turn to nowhere. The line between Mary's delusion and reality is continuously tried to be blurred, and everything ends in as much conclusion as in ambiguity, but in either case feeling a little underwhelming. In other words, "Open 24 Hours" 'fizzles out' towards the end as the second half gradually favors simpler tropes and actionable filler.
On the other hand, all is well in the horrors taking place in the gas station, for the entire cast provides rather nifty little performances, with the highlight inarguably belonging to Vanessa Grasse. Another satisfying and consistently good aspect of "Open 24 Hours" is its aesthetic coating, built from creative, handsome cinematography and a solid effort by the FX and make-up team. Though perhaps not in excessive amounts, gore hounds will find their desert served extra bloody. On the matters of sound, in my opinion the original score didn't really have an extraordinary touches, as it reminded lot of the musical palette used in a multitude of genre flicks. If musical scores can be described as cliché, this one kind of is.
While the set bar of technical qualities of "Open 24 Hours" never seem to diminish, the substance, or story, on a certain level, does. All in all Padraig Reynold's newest hooray in horror is an entertaining (enough) and effortful indie piece, flaws and some lesser turns included. My rating: 5/10.
