I don’t think I’ve ever wanted more to like a movie and been unable to.
This movie starts off like a typical stupid teen b-movie slasher pic: a group of teenagers at a remote cabin. It takes it’s time before springing the surprise that it’s something different… sort of. Time stops, and they discover that they’re in a horror movie and have accidentally gone off-script, that understanding helped along by discovering a copy of the script, and seeing where it diverged. They realize that for time to restart and any of them to escape, they must die as the script says they will. Already, by this point in the movie, there are some bad non-diegetic bad signs of what’s to come: a few points passing where characters’ behavior or responses don’t make sense. It passes, at least temporarily, as they get into the whole fourth-wall mindfuck of trying to figure out how the script figures into how they can survive, dealing with realizing they have no memories but what’s been written for them, a few places where they use the cute trick of letting the viewer, by way of one of the characters, see the script dialogue that that character has in the following scene, and it all starts to look much more clever than it initially did. For a while it felt like the little cousin of “Cabin In The Woods”… still very much a b-movie, it never manages to rise above that even at its best, but with enough cleverness to the idea that it it works.
Until it doesn’t. For the second half of the movie, the heroine tries to save herself by rewriting the script, and unfortunately the movie’s real life writers weren’t up to juggling the mindbendiness of that. Most of the second half of the film consists of a pastiche of scenes with no thread between them, as the movie starts over and over again as she rewrites it, but the way it proceeds makes no sense at all, it’s just a jumble of scenes with no development or clever thread to follow. And then finally it just ends, with scenes of both her being killed and her defeating the killer, who incomprehensibly stumbles past the corpses of her that he left in the the previous scenes. It seems like someone had a really good idea of how to develop the conceit, but just wasn’t able at all to execute it. I went from thinking it was a terrible movie before the reveal that brings the fourth wall down, to thinking it was an interesting-enough flawed gem, to thinking it was bad but enjoyable, to thinking it was just bad, totally unenjoyable and disappointing. It just doesn’t work at all and it honestly seems like it doesn’t even try to. I don’t know what they were thinking.
It’s a real shame. It could at least have been memorable, but sitting through such a promising premise for such a disappointing and tediously over-long non-ending is not enjoyable.