"Don't Move" is an abduction thriller with nothing to say. Seriously, the threadbare 93-minute two-hander contains very few cogent observations about its fractured characters or its supposed suspense. This film is simply a simulation of the genre beats you expect in a story about a man kidnapping a woman in the woods. The cloying setup also leaves much to be desired, as does the anticlimactic ending. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
With Sam Raimi as producer, directors Brian Netto and Adam Schindler care little about the lead character at the center of T.J. Cimfel and David Whiteake's unremarkable script. Though we first see Iris (Kelsey Asbille, "Yellowstone") waking up next to her husband, we get the sense that her daze has lasted longer than her sleep. The couple tragically lost their son in a hiking accident. While they were carving their initials on a tree, a young Mateo walked off a cliff (I wish I were joking). Making sure not to stir her husband, on this morning, Iris silently dresses and walks out the door without her phone. She drives to a hiking trail with only a pocket knife and her son's red toy boat by her side. Iris parks, walks down the trail, climbs over boulders, and up to the summit, where she plans to leap to her death.
"Beautiful view," observes Richard (Finn Wittrock). A seemingly genial man, Richard disrupts Iris' suicide attempt. He spins a yarn about how, years ago, he contemplated taking his own life when his partner Chloe died in a car crash. By sharing his pain, he somehow talks Iris off a literal ledge. The pair venture back down the rocky terrain toward their respective cars. It's here that Richard abducts Iris, injecting her with a serum that will eventually paralyze her long enough for him to take her to his secluded cabin for the weekend. As you'd expect, Richard's foolproof plan doesn't account for Iris' resolve. She evades him for a time before becoming his property again.
"Don't Move" shares some of the same DNA with M. Night Shyamalan's "Trap." Similar to Josh Hartnett's keen Cooper Abbott, the whip-smart Richard is very quick on his feet. He sweet-talks the mountain man hiding Iris and quickly thinks up plausible excuses and broad stories for anyone questioning his motives. He also has a family who clearly don't know he is a serial killer. But that's where the comparisons between "Don't Move" and "Trap" stop. Ultimately, this film isn't psychologically interested in its villain. Richard is nothing more than a menacing presence, a crooked smile without an emotional throughline. With a limited character to play with, Wittrock strains to imbue unease into lame scenarios that only deaden the film's nearly nonexistent pulse.
You could point a similar incuriosity at how the film doesn't truly see Iris. Because the character is paralyzed throughout much of the thriller, it's up to Asbille to provide some interiority in a mostly silent role. Unfortunately, her darting eyes and twitching muscles (a physical manifestation of the paralyzed grief that has haunted her) can only do so much work. We never really go beyond the simple metaphor of Iris' grief for her son or the depression that has ruled her life since his untimely death. And apart from the briefest of flashbacks, the film never finds a unique way to step outside the character's frozen exterior. We spend an entire film with Iris, but learn nothing new about her that we didn't know in the film's opening ten minutes.
"Don't Move" also suffers from bad VFX, a hyperactive score, and an inability to craft the kind of tense mood necessary for a thriller like this to work. The best thing that can be said about "Don't Move" is that if you hazard to press play on Netflix, the time you may have wasted is at least easily forgettable.
