billyzduke

A film that takes its potentially great premise and lovely leading lady and flushes them down a generically scored funnel of half-assed jump scares, piss poor dialogue, and about the laziest plotting I've ever witnessed. Just watch Come True (or even the documentary The Nightmare) to see a movie that makes sleep paralysis intriguing and frightening... I mean, it's sleep paralysis, it's both of those things already by default in real life, you have to TRULY screw up your movie to neuter this premise. And that's pretty much all that Mara manages for its entire runtime.

Uniformly terrible from the very beginning onward, right up until the end, when it gets ever so slightly even worse. The opening credits/cyborg creation sequence, despite the bulk of the film's budget clearly having gone toward CG animation, makes zero sense physically (even for imaginary future technology) and just doesn't manage to compare to numerous previous attempts at similar sequences, the superior opening of HBO's Westworld most fresh in mind.

The script is just a series of generic plot points spoken aloud (albeit including references to the aforementioned non-existent technology, but the tech complexity never even approaches Star Trek levels). Every single line is just declamatory, like each actor is reading from the outline for a script rather than dialog meant for any specific character. There are no honest emotional points of entry, no way to connect with any of the set pieces unfolding on screen. Even if it were not a complete disgrace to the classic source material, it would be a complete disgrace on its own.

Way too much Lucy, not nearly enough Under the Skin.

Well I guess it's safe to say Inside was a fluke... There are a few promising ideas here, but the music box / creep show / pedantically telegraphed presentation pretty much annihilates any enjoyment one could expect to extract. Overscored, overstyled, tonally incoherent, devastatingly underwritten, and most often, just plain dumb. I just finished watching it, and I'm honestly still in shock that it was just so... abysmal.

As my review must be 10 lines long, I will attempt to say something positive about the film: I did like the very end, but man, the drudgery required to get there... From about the first time a taxidermied animal (sitting at a tea party, no less) inexplicably moves, I was on the verge of turning it off. Yeah, that's about as positive as it gets.