Netflix needs to hire somebody that can do a better job at classifying genres for their films. When I looked up for ‘horror’ on the site, one of the first few suggestions that came up was ‘House At The End of the Street’ starring Jennifer Lawrence. Assuming it was a horror film, I started to watch it.
In the very first few minutes, the direction seems sketchy and annoying. A seemingly possessed/deranged girl murders her parents and escapes. Months after the brutal double murder, a teen girl and her mom move in to the same neighborhood. What follows is a weird tale of how the teenager befriends her asocial neighbor, a college-going boy called Ryan, who was not at the crime scene when his sister killed their parents. However, Ryan has his own dark secrets. The ‘horror’ bit is about how locals believe that his psycho sister still lives in the woods.
Jennifer Lawrence was 22-years-old when this film came out, but looks the part of the teen she is supposed to play, almost baby-like. However, there’s not much to her character. She is a reclusive teen who according to her doctor mother – “likes to play savior & picks the most damaged kid, so that she can fix them”. The damaged kid here is Ryan, the boy everybody has ostracized due to the murders.
I cannot recall one good scene from the film, everything is just so forgettable. Even the acting by most of the cast is pretty flat, nothing impressive. The movie is slow and has several unnecessary scenes. While there is a pretty good twist at the end, the rest of the film is so irritating, that it doesn’t even mater.
I think I was majorly disappointed because I was expecting a horror film and instead got a mediocre thriller on my hands. If the makers deliberately bracketed this film in the ‘horror’ genre, it makes it even worse, because it’s absolutely misleading for horror fans. Very early on the movie, the viewer can establish that this is just a thriller, a bad one at that.