Red River Road

This movie proves skilled direction and acting can save a movie from ludicrous writing... until they don't.

This movie starts with a family having moved to a rural home to avoid a pandemic. Slowly hints are dropped that it's worse than the pandemic we actually had: "when they turned off the internet" is mentioned in passing.

For the beginning, we just see slice-of-life scenes of family life holed up in this house, and excellent direction and believable acting both keep it engaging and slowly build a not-yet-explained unease—in fact, they keep it engaging and believable enough that when the ludicrous idea of the movie is finally revealed, the production has built up enough credibility to suspend disbelief enough to actually, bettern than might be imagined, pull off the reveal: the "pandemic" is an epidemic of insanity that spreads by using the internet.

Ok, so far, so good. If they had me engaged it enough to give them a pass for an idea that stupid, and actually managed somehow to play something that ludicrous believably, then they were doing well.

Unfortunately, from there, things slowly peter out. The acting and production values remain surprisingly good but the writing apparently consists of one idea, and follows that idea through with increasing predictability as the film goes on, and begins introducing overly familiar tropes we've seen before, until the viewer figures out what's happening waaaaay before the family does.

By the end of the movie, I was shaking my head at how poor the writing was. This is, essentially, a terrible movie that got handed to a good enough director and actors to almost save it.

Almost.

And it's an incredible disappointment that they only almost saved it, instead of actually saving it. Because, boy, did it look in the beginning like it might be good.

Unfortunately the ending is so bad, despite the obvious best efforts of everyone in the production, that I can't even recommend it as basically watchable. The writing just isn't there in the end, there's nothing to salvage.

EDIT: This is interesting. I looked up this movie after writing this review. The entire thing was acted, shot, and produced by a real family in their real home during the pandemic. The couple of "dream sequences" are their actual home movies. The actors had to operate the cameras during the scenes, they had nobody else because of the quarantine, including on-screen actors occasionally having to use ropes to move the camera, without being seen, when all four family members were in the shot.

That makes it all the more impressive how well-acted and directed this is. This is an extremely talented family.

But, dang, dad just doesn't know how to write a full-length thriller. At all. Such a disappointment. Everything else about it is really very good, but poor plot development is just kind of a showstopper.