Safer at home
The last time Blumhouse created a modernized slasher-thriller that they released exclusively on Peacock, it was the underwhelming and grating They/Them, so it wasn't exactly impossible for them to raise the bar with Sick, which dropped on the streaming service this Friday the 13th. They even had Scream scribe Kevin Williamson on hand, working together on the screenplay with Katelynn Crabb, which was brought to the screen under the auspices of director John Hyams.
Set in April 2020, Sick is the newest horror film to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic head on. The film follows college students Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Bethlehem Million) as they head to Parker's father's secluded and lavish lake house to spend quarantine in style, ensconced in its fabulously ugly faux-log cabin interiors. Parker is clearly more blasé about the whole germ thing than Miri, a med student with an immunocompromised father, which becomes extra clear when her sorta boyfriend DJ (Dylan Sprayberry) shows up unannounced and she lets him spend the night.
However, the pandemic won't be the only deadly thing the three of them will need to escape, as a masked killer (like, literally masked, pandemic style, which is weirdly the only COVID element of the film that it doesn't over-indicate with a huge flashing neon sign) turns up the first night of their stay, forcing them to run for their lives while still occasionally navigating the different ways that the pandemic has changed the ways they are able to interact with the rest of the world.
Now, I would love to say that Sick is an improvement on They/Them, but it turns out it's basically a mirror image opposite of that film. Where They/Them was a solid enough character study that lacks the smallest shred of an idea of how to craft a slasher, Sick is a mechanically skilled home invasion slasher with absolutely no sense of humanity.
It's a real shame because, when it gets down to it, it's a hell of a picture about young people using every tool at their disposal to survive a terrifying situation. Sick is visceral and mean, taking surprising turns in the extended chase sequence whenever it gets the opportunity and delivering some gruesomely memorable moments of bodily harm, keeping the excellent conceit that Williamson originally used in Scream wherein the killer is ultimately fallible and able to be knocked down and pushed around. This is all ever so slightly marred by Hyams' insistence on framing the victims in uncomfortably tight close-ups that limit the audience's view of the action, but for the most part, Sick is an entirely effective cat-and-mouse game.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of other material around the home invasion antics. First and foremost, Sick is an abject failure as an attempt to satirize the early pandemic, with only a handful of moments that feel authentic (the best of which is a young woman accidentally letting out a brief cough while in line at a grocery store and drawing the paranoid glares of everyone around her). The rest is either mired in lazy writing (jokes about the toilet paper shortage should have been retired and lifted into the rafters two years ago) or inconsistent characterization.
For instance, the one thing we really learn about Miri is the fact that she's serious about following COVID protocols. So the fact that every other scene sees her completely ignoring the ground rules that she has set out for herself and others really rankles. This lapse isn't meant to be a commentary about how people are hypocritical, it's just inconsistent and perplexing, more a continuity error than anything remotely helpful to the experience of watching the film.
Speaking of, a particular moment in the third act hammers home the fact that the film is clearly set during the pandemic so it can service a "clever" twist on the slasher formula rather than because it has any interest in telling a story grounded in human emotion. There is a revelation that should be earth-shattering, but the film literally forgets to examine it for even a second. It rings completely hollow because there isn't an ounce of care put into the characters and their worldviews. Sick only cares about the functionality of Harper and Miri, and their ability to act as blank ciphers upon which the film can scrawl out the overarching message that has been already muddled beyond comprehension by the third act.
COVID isn't the only element where Sick drops the ball. Because the non-chase sequences are so focused on delivering lowest-common-denominator gags about masks and hand sanitizer, anything resembling human behavior gets sucked right through an HVAC filter, never to be seen again. If there is a dialogue scene in Sick that uses a previous scene as a way to inform some semblance of cause-and-effect or human behavior, it is entirely by accident.
Oh, and there's a "boink" sound on the score that happens over and over again that's really annoying, so there's that. Look, I really wish I liked Sick. I came in hoping I would. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if a movie is going to attempt to shoulder the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic and make something light and entertaining out of it, it needs to do a hell of a lot better than this.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Set in April 2020, Sick is the newest horror film to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic head on. The film follows college students Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Bethlehem Million) as they head to Parker's father's secluded and lavish lake house to spend quarantine in style, ensconced in its fabulously ugly faux-log cabin interiors. Parker is clearly more blasé about the whole germ thing than Miri, a med student with an immunocompromised father, which becomes extra clear when her sorta boyfriend DJ (Dylan Sprayberry) shows up unannounced and she lets him spend the night.
However, the pandemic won't be the only deadly thing the three of them will need to escape, as a masked killer (like, literally masked, pandemic style, which is weirdly the only COVID element of the film that it doesn't over-indicate with a huge flashing neon sign) turns up the first night of their stay, forcing them to run for their lives while still occasionally navigating the different ways that the pandemic has changed the ways they are able to interact with the rest of the world.
Now, I would love to say that Sick is an improvement on They/Them, but it turns out it's basically a mirror image opposite of that film. Where They/Them was a solid enough character study that lacks the smallest shred of an idea of how to craft a slasher, Sick is a mechanically skilled home invasion slasher with absolutely no sense of humanity.
It's a real shame because, when it gets down to it, it's a hell of a picture about young people using every tool at their disposal to survive a terrifying situation. Sick is visceral and mean, taking surprising turns in the extended chase sequence whenever it gets the opportunity and delivering some gruesomely memorable moments of bodily harm, keeping the excellent conceit that Williamson originally used in Scream wherein the killer is ultimately fallible and able to be knocked down and pushed around. This is all ever so slightly marred by Hyams' insistence on framing the victims in uncomfortably tight close-ups that limit the audience's view of the action, but for the most part, Sick is an entirely effective cat-and-mouse game.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of other material around the home invasion antics. First and foremost, Sick is an abject failure as an attempt to satirize the early pandemic, with only a handful of moments that feel authentic (the best of which is a young woman accidentally letting out a brief cough while in line at a grocery store and drawing the paranoid glares of everyone around her). The rest is either mired in lazy writing (jokes about the toilet paper shortage should have been retired and lifted into the rafters two years ago) or inconsistent characterization.
For instance, the one thing we really learn about Miri is the fact that she's serious about following COVID protocols. So the fact that every other scene sees her completely ignoring the ground rules that she has set out for herself and others really rankles. This lapse isn't meant to be a commentary about how people are hypocritical, it's just inconsistent and perplexing, more a continuity error than anything remotely helpful to the experience of watching the film.
Speaking of, a particular moment in the third act hammers home the fact that the film is clearly set during the pandemic so it can service a "clever" twist on the slasher formula rather than because it has any interest in telling a story grounded in human emotion. There is a revelation that should be earth-shattering, but the film literally forgets to examine it for even a second. It rings completely hollow because there isn't an ounce of care put into the characters and their worldviews. Sick only cares about the functionality of Harper and Miri, and their ability to act as blank ciphers upon which the film can scrawl out the overarching message that has been already muddled beyond comprehension by the third act.
COVID isn't the only element where Sick drops the ball. Because the non-chase sequences are so focused on delivering lowest-common-denominator gags about masks and hand sanitizer, anything resembling human behavior gets sucked right through an HVAC filter, never to be seen again. If there is a dialogue scene in Sick that uses a previous scene as a way to inform some semblance of cause-and-effect or human behavior, it is entirely by accident.
Oh, and there's a "boink" sound on the score that happens over and over again that's really annoying, so there's that. Look, I really wish I liked Sick. I came in hoping I would. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if a movie is going to attempt to shoulder the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic and make something light and entertaining out of it, it needs to do a hell of a lot better than this.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
