Film Review: DEATH OF ME (2020): A Thriller that Fails to Capture the Evil that could be Lurking in a Tropical Paradise

Death of Me Review

Death of Me (2020) Film Review, a movie directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, and starring Maggie Q, Luke Helmsworth, Alex Essoe, Kat Ingkarat, Kelly B. Jones, Caledonia Burr and Chatchawai Kamonsakpitak.

Don’t watch this film if you have just had a meal. Don’t watch it if you can’t handle large quantities of blood and gore and even the downright gross. And especially don’t watch it if you are still in possession of your logical reasoning faculties. Because Death of Me is mind fornication alright, but hardly at its best. Even granting that watching a film often entails willing suspension of disbelief, the glaring lack of logic and common sense in this Darren Lynn Bousman creation can be seriously off-putting.

That said, Death of Me definitely has its moments. But just when a particularly ominous scene makes you think you are on to a good thing, the overuse of the same tired motifs for black magic and sinister rituals make you want to tear your hair out.

The film opens with Christine (Maggie Q) and Neil (Luke Helmsworth), a couple on vacation on an island off the Thai coastline, waking up in their Airbnb unit, clueless as to what happened after they got drunk the night before. An excellent start that gets you hooked right away! And later, when they watch a video recorded on Neil’s camera of Christine being assaulted, murdered and buried by her husband, you are sucked right into the movie’s universe. What chain of events led to Christine witnessing her own death? You can’t wait to find out.

But the film loses momentum almost immediately and, for the remainder of its duration, you are left wondering when, if ever, the pace will pick up again. In fact, the plot loses its way well before midpoint, leaving the viewer wondering what the hell is going on.

About halfway through the film, when Neil, a travel reporter, records a video message on his phone that goes something like this, ‘My travel companion and I… we are about to die a horrible death’, you think “Bingo! So this film is about some elaborate stunt for a reality TV show for viewers with bad taste.”

But naturally, we are dragged right back into Christine’s hideous hallucinations and of possibilities of alternate realities existing parallel to each other. And inexplicably, Christine keeps accepting beverages from her Airbnb host, Samantha (Alex Essoe), even after learning that her multiple fits of hallucinations had been triggered by something added to her drink.

This film is living proof that idyllic settings and panoramic shots of exotic locales, interspersed with scenes of ritualistic violence, do not make up for the lack of a solid storyline. Throughout its length, the movie toys with an idea, such as the use of found footage, and immediately discards it for the next quick fix. But the lack of continuity is obvious in other areas too. For example, bruises on Christine’s throat from Neil trying to strangle her disappear in the following scene.

Okay, so maybe they eventually land up in some sort of a modern-day heaven, on a secluded beach, Christine clutching a perfectly flat belly while Neil tells her ‘It’s a girl’. But they find Christine’s body on the typhoon-ravaged island, roughly in the state we had seen her last. And they also find her body in a raft adrift on the high seas. And no one finds Neil’s body anywhere.

Yes, the film will remind you of Rosemary’s Baby. It may also remind you of better-made films about fertility cults and regressive practices. But in spite of all the props, it fails to capture the evil that could be lurking in a tropical paradise in the way Beach, a spine-chilling thriller shot on a pristine Thai island and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, did years ago. This one ends up looking like a bad acid trip.

Rating: 5/10

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