★★★☆☆
CINEMA has a long tradition of putting a blood-soaked spin on the traditional festive movie, from 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night to 2015’s Krampus and beyond. This subversive, feel-bad offering from second-time Aussie-Canadian director Chris Peckover (Undocumented) is sure to prove a hit with the late-night horror crowd looking for something a little more sinister this holiday season.
On a quiet and seemingly safe suburban street, teenage babysitter Ashley (Olivia DeJonge) is left to look after 12-year-old Luke (Levi Miller) and his best friend Garrett (Ed Oxenbould) while Luke’s parents (Virginia Madsen and Patrick Warburton) are away on a trip.
Another night, another boring night of babysitting … or so she thinks. When masked intruders suddenly break into the house, Ashley does her best to protect Luke and Garrett from any and all harm. But she soon discovers that this is no ordinary home invasion.
What follows is a fairly clever riff on conventions and expectations, mixing heightened Home Alone-esque shenanigans with the nastiness of 1974’s Black Christmas, gleefully twisting the knife into how the audiences supposes this is all going to play out.
Despite its frequent moments of wince-inducing slasher violence, full-on gore is rather conspicuous by its absence. Sometimes this is an effective way to let the audience imagine the worst, at others it leaves the execution of its shock-filled intentions feeling somewhat toothless and inferior to Netflix’s recent, similarly themed horror The Babysitter.
Tonally it’s a little erratic, veering from the outright silly – carollers singing at the door as an unwitting choir to violence that would almost be considered slapstick if it weren’t so brutal – and then deadly serious the next. It’s therefore too silly to be truly psychologically resonant but also too brutal to be ignored as throwaway nonsense. There are also examinations of toxic masculinity, age-appropriate behaviour and white male privilege lurking beneath the surface but, despite effective performances particularly from Miller, they’re only grazed rather than really explored.
Still, it’s more than we get in many other films of this ilk; the fact that it has a bash at something more meaningful doesn’t count for nothing. And Peckover clearly has an eye for stylish and playful horror.Working from a script he co-wrote with Zack Kahn, he’s delivered an entertaining slice of fun for anyone with an aversion to saccharine Christmas movie fare.
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