The Film Reports

FILM REVIEW

2.5 stars

Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Featuring for the first time on this website – a film that is actually in cinemas right now. Pretty appropriate for Halloween. More importantly, Happy Death Day manages to be season-appropriate while being appropriate for the easily scared. (No judgement, i hate ghost films too).

Happy Death Day starts off okay; the protagonist is a sorority girl named Tree (yeah, I know) who has just woken up in a random boy’s bedroom. It’s her birthday but somebody with a sense of irony is about to kill her – hence the title. She wakes up at the beginning of the same day, yadda yadda yadda, we’ve all seen Groundhog day.

It’s obviously not a ground-breaking film. There are stereotypes flying left, right and centre, and it obviously pulls alot from lots of different films. However, that doesn’t mean the movie’s not good. It’s actually pretty good. 

Round about the same time that Tree woke up the third time, I did begin to get a little frustrated and bored. Tree is a very obviously satirical character but sometimes that goes a little bit overboard to the point where the filmmakers aren’t poking fun of a stereotype but are instead reinforcing that stereotype. Not to worry though, the film quickly moves on, quickly changing the narrative and starts to summarise her day instead.

I would definitely class this more of a thriller than horror and the main reasons are as follows: apart from several jump-scares (and obviously the killer aspect), there isn’t anything I would class as horror. Second, the whole film is very narrative-driven; Tree needs to find out who’s killing her to stop the cycle. It doesn’t have a Sherlock Holmes vibe – no sleuthing here – but there are so many people it could potentially be. No spoilers but I would have ideally preferred the mystery to be more solid but because of the nature of the film, I had fun anyways and it didn’t matter.

Watch it: at night, with friends 🙂