Don’t Move

The title of Don’t Move is somewhat evocative of Don’t Breathe, another fairly successful horror movie. I haven’t actually seen Don’t Breathe but have it on my “someday if there’s nothing more interesting available” list, and the premise of Don’t Move is a little more interesting to me – a woman is targeted by a serial killer and injected with a paralytic to create a state of induced locked-in syndrome. Locked-in syndrome is specifically, genuinely horrifying to me, so I was both curious how they’d tell a story with a protagonist who literally cannot move for large stretches of the movie as well as interested in some thrills.

Unfortunately while it was well-acted and well-produced, Don’t Move just didn’t work for me. It was an interesting story, but it wasn’t as horrifying as I expected, and after some consideration I believe I came up with a large reason as to why: for almost the entire movie, the camera is focusing on the protagonist Iris from the perspective of someone else in the room. The most we get of her internal experience is close ups of her face, and I think it would be a lot more harrowing if there were more shots of what she could see, where we can hear other characters moving around off screen without being able to turn to look at what they were doing. That’s the horror of locked-in syndrome! But instead of experiencing what she’s experiencing, we’re just watching her experience it, and that’s a massive miss.