Overview
A grieving woman in a secluded forest encounters a killer who injects her with a paralytic drug. As her body shuts down, her fight for survival begins.
Produced by Sam Raimi, and directed by Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, Don’t Move is a thriller that sees a grieving mother named Iris (Kelsey Asbille), who is contemplating ending it all by jumping off a cliff in the wilderness, when a stranger named Richard (Finn Wittrock) talks her out of her actions. Returning to their parked cars, Richard attacks Iris with a stun device and ties her up, placing her in the back of his car. During an attempt to escape, Richard injects Iris with a paralysing agent, which will render her helpless within 20 minutes. Can Iris escape before the agent takes hold, as Richard pursues her into the forested wilderness?
An intriguing set-up, offering tension at the start, swiftly falls apart rapidly largely due to a lack of any depth to any of the characters, making it hard to actually care for the peril Iris is in. In addition, it doesn’t take long to realise that having someone motionless for the majority of the film isn’t actually as interesting as the idea suggests, and also results in quite a few moments which seem unfeasable as Richard stalks Iris, with her somehow managing to be laid in a perfectly hidden manner despite her limitations. By the time the film rolled past the hour mark, with 30 minutes left to play out, the thin script had run out of ideas and just plods to a rather limp finale, adding in a couple more underdeveloped support characters who speak in the way that people only ever speak in films.
This feels like just another example of the sub-average fare that we have come to expect from the Netflix machine, with little to no creativity to make it anything more than a thankfully short diversion that will be quite swiftly forgotten.