By Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com

originally published: 11/04/2024

For as long as I can remember I've had a recurring dream where I'm being pursued by someone or something only to find that I can't move my legs. I end up stuck in one place, awaiting my fate as whatever it is that's on my tail makes its way towards me before I'm rescued by my alarm clock. With Don't Move, directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, and writers TJ Cimfel and David White, have created a thriller that's literally the stuff of my nightmares. Like the dream I can't shake, it features a prone protagonist, but there's nothing ambiguous or metaphorical about the antagonist, who is simply another predatory man with a God complex.

Don't Move opens with an arresting prologue that could function as a short film in its own right. Unable to continue living, Iris (Kelsey Asbille) drives out to the mountain range where her young son died after falling off a cliff. She plans to end it all by jumping from the very same cliff, but she's interrupted by a passerby, Richard (Finn Wittrock), who quickly realises what she's about to do. Richard knows exactly what to say to talk Iris down, using some reverse psychology and an anecdote about his own grief over the girlfriend he lost in a car crash. "Broken doesn't have to mean hopeless," are the words that get through to Iris, who pulls her feet away from the cliff edge and walks back down to her car with Richard. But just as they're about to say goodbye and move on with their separate lives, Richard knocks Iris out with a stun gun.

Waking in the back of Richard's car with her hands tied behind her back, Iris manages to free herself and cause Richard to crash his car into a tree. But as she prepares to flee she learns the grim truth of her predicament: Richard has injected her with a drug that will cause her body to completely shut down in about 20 minutes, and she will remain paralysed for roughly an hour, giving him enough time to get her to his cabin.

The ensuing cat and mouse game plays out in something close to real time and resembles an actual encounter between a cat and a mouse as Richard toys with his prone prey. With her body out of action, Iris is forced to use her head, or more specifically her eyes, to survive. Much of the tension comes not from the presence of Richard, whom she initially escapes, but from Iris's attempts to interact with would-be saviours while in a non-communicative state. The film leans heavily into its battle of the sexes aspect by mining tension from our fears that Richard might be able to win over Iris's potential male rescuers with his well-rehearsed patter, claiming at various points that Iris is either drunk or hysterical.

Don't Move is most effective when it focusses on the body-horror element of its premise, often resembling a thriller reworking of the scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Dicaprio struggles to crawl to his car while paralysed by quaaludes. There's something primal about our fear of losing control of our body, and Don't Move recognises this by pitting the sort of obstacles we usually avoid - crawling insects, fire, rising water - against the immobile Iris. But the movie never fully exploits this aspect and you might find yourself wishing it had been made by some French lunatic - a Fargeat, Ducournau or Aja - who might devise some grislier sequences.

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Don't Move suffers from being a little too refined and tasteful, with Iris unfeasibly maintaining control of her bladder and an unrealistic lack of immediate sexual threat from Richard. Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity here is the film's lack of interest in interrogating the idea of a man stealing a woman's agency and bodily autonomy, even if via what would generally be considered a good deed. There's really only one satisfying ending to Iris's narrative, but no mainstream American thriller, certainly not one acquired by Netflix, would dare to go there.