'Death of Me' Review: This horror mix of 'Rosemary's Baby' and orientalism is so bad that it's not even good
Spoilers for ‘Death of Me’
Bad horror movies are usually great. And usually, the cheesier they are, the better they make for a watch. Yet, there is only a certain degree of bad that makes the cut for this. And ‘Death of Me’ transcends that line so drastically, it takes away the pleasure of enjoying a bad scary flick in the Halloween season. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, based on a screenplay by Arli Margolis, James Morley III, and David Tish, ‘Death of Me’ follows a couple, vacationing on an island off the coast of Thailand. One day, Neil (Luke Hemsworth) and Christine (Maggie Q) wake up hungover with no memory of the previous night. They find footage on Neil's camera, and watch, horrified, as Neil appears to murder Christine. But Christine is alive, which makes their confusion all the more potent.
What follows is a Kafkaesque nightmare for both - the couple and viewers of the film. For the couple, it's being stuck on an island with their passports missing, feeling trapped because everyone else seems to be aware of some secret, mysterious thing going on that they can’t seem to figure out. For viewers, it’s constantly looking at your phone, trying to figure out how much time has elapsed since the film began, realizing deep into the film’s plot that there is another hour of this nightmare left to suffer.
The film has exactly zero moments of horror. It is instead filled with childish jolting moments where Maggie Q constantly keeps waking up from visions, unable to comprehend what is real and what is a hallucination. It has some gore - because that’s what Bousman brings to the table from his days in the ‘Saw’ franchise. But even the gore feels laughable (if you still have patience left to laugh). It feels like an attempt to make the film look more visceral and scary than it actually is.
Admittedly though, Hemsworth cutting up his own belly and pulling out his intestines was a great reminder of how medical procedural dramas with lower budgets deserve more credit for their efforts than we usually grant them. So, there is some worth to the film, if only as an example of how not to do things. In the last 30 minutes of the film, the plot gets more tropey, with Maggie Q’s Christine suddenly finding out that she’s pregnant and the ultrasound machine showing a deformed monstrous creature in her womb. How truly original right? The film goes all ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, including the trope with the pendant - in ‘Death of Me’, Christine’s pendant supposedly keeps her in a plane of existence where she is neither dead nor alive.
The reveal is all too underwhelming. The islanders sacrifice pregnant women to save themselves from storms - and the fact that they have never faced a storm in 200 years is mentioned plenty of times in the movie to become apparent at some point that it has a major role to play in the story. If only it wasn’t so predictably bad, right? The film’s final moments see Christine escape on a boat, and the storm destroying the island, killing many of its residents.
When coast guards find Christine’s body in a boat, they pronounce her dead. But in the very last scene, as she lies inside a body bag, we see Christine is still alive. Let’s hope this does not mean there’s going to be a sequel.
‘Death of Me’ is as mediocre a film as it gets (it’s a travesty when you consider it from the lens of horror films). And the story is so transparently orientalist and bad, it overshadows both Maggie Q and Hemsworth’s performances, which aren’t really bad. Broadly, if you want to watch a movie because you have time to kill and want to spend most of its duration browsing Instagram on your phone, ‘Death of Me’ is perfect. But for anything else, consider watching something more well-written. Maybe, like Chris Columbus’ ‘Gremlins’.
‘Death of Me’ is playing at select theaters and is available on-demand.