A home invasion thriller with a nice little twist, we bring you our Girl Gone Bad review.
Samantha prepares for a date night with her high school girlfriend, Amanda. As her mom leaves for the weekend, she starts to hear sounds in her house. She receives a text message showing unexpected and grizzly news and tries to call Amanda’s phone… which she finds broken on the patio… with an intruder in her home.
A game of cat and mouse ensues, before Samantha manages the upper hand and captures him in the basement. The tables have turned. From there, things just get started in a story of love, grief, and vengeance.
Doing a festival round under the title of Guiltless this debut feature from writer / director Kevin Schultz certainly has a way of holding your attention even during the many lulls.
The premise is intriguing and the movie is shot quite well, above what you’d expect the quality to be from a low-budget independent. The quality of the movie only dips during flashback exposition scenes which don’t really add a great deal of context (in my opinion) to what is happening around Samantha during this strange ordeal.
From the usual 16 year old teenage girl one second to a stone cold killer the next after her girlfriend is brutally murdered by the same man she now holds captive.
The story bounces around this payback and retribution angle but the flashbacks contradict almost every reasoning Samantha has for doing what she’s doing. They relationship was an absolute mess and the killer did her a favour by cutting (literally) her out of her life.
Holding out suspense when it comes to holding a man captive for an entire film is clearly no easy feat as I felt just as bored as the man being held captive must have been down in that basement.
The twists are quite unique and that’s why Girl Gone Bad just about keeps my attention going through its more lethargic sections but it does just enough to warrant a watch.
Hollow dialogue and repetitive scripting (there’s only so many times I can hear the same back and forth between prisoner and captor) certainly grate but sound design comes to the fold when the screen cuts to black during the gory moments.
Girl Gone bad certainly started on a high when a flame flickered over a nice freshly rolled doobie at the start of the movie but by midway had crumbled to ashes completely. There’s zero suspense, zero motive left for our main character anymore and other than a solid performance from Alison Thornton there’s really not much worth keeping my eyes open for.
I admire the filmmakers for included the cool twists that were cleverly delivered but once they had been revealed there really wasn’t much point in dragging it out for a 90-minute duration. Girl Gone Bad would have made a wonderful short film but struggles to find its feet when released as a feature.
Girl Gone Bad review by Sean Evans
Our Rating
Summary
A film that opens with much promise but quickly fades to ashes with a lack of structure and depth. Girl Gone Bad is twisty but sadly its lethargic pacing and quite pointless character motives become the films downfall.
