We all know what to expect from a home invasion movie by this stage: a family under siege from mysterious assailants, a lot of scrambling around in the dark, punctuated by the odd scare, one last ditch effort by our heroes to fend off their attackers. Y'know, the usual. While You're Next doesn't deviate that far from the tried and trusted formula, director/editor Adam Wingard (last seen on horror anthologies V/HS and V/H/S/2) and screen writer Simon Barrett throw in enough twists and turns to elevate this from the crowd, while also treating the audience to an inventive and thrilling take on the genre.
The premise for You're Next is simple enough. The Davison family meet up at their opulent holiday home to celebrate a wedding anniversary, and are soon picked off one by one by a mysterious group of killers, sporting machetes and crossbows, and decked out in animal masks. It's your typical game of cat and mouse, but what really opens up the movie up, and sends it off in some surprising directions, is the fact one of the mice can break the cats necks, namely Sharni Vinson's Erin, the girlfriend of one the Davison's sons, who is quite adept at knives herself and knows a bit too much about the ins and outs of booby trapping your house.
Kicking off with a taste of things to come, the film wastes no time in bringing the lambs to the slaughterhouse, setting up some nice in fighting, which, if it wasn't for the ominous music and shots of a wolf masked stranger watching the family, would almost make you think you were sitting down to watch a drama about a dysfunctional family. It doesn't take long for the first crossbow bolt to fly (right into the head of Ti West, director of the awesome ghost story The Innkeepers), and that's when the movie really kicks into high gear. You're Next is not a movie for the faint of heart, with the gore coming thick and fast at a very early stage. Each kill is unique and inventive, from being treated like a pin cushion with rusty tools to a blender to the head (which brings with it shades of early Sam Raimi), it never feels over the top (o.k., the blender part comes close), and the violence is disgustingly realistic. There is a nice line in pitch black humour running through the movie, but it too often gets lost amidst the violence and gore. Erin is a great addition to proceedings, presenting a character a million miles away from the usual victims in these types of movies, and Vinson plays her perfectly, gleefully bludgeoning her attackers to death, and spending most of her screen time brandishing anything from an axe to a meat tenderiser, all the while caked in blood. Not bad for a veteran of Home and Away.
A lot of effort has been put into You're Next, with everything from the editing to the music, making this a stylish and tense affair. Now, while I normally crib about the over use of music in horror movies, more often than not telling you that you should feel scared instead of letting you get there yourself, but here it rarely lets up from the opening scene, which helps put you in a permanent state of unease, and ratchets up the tension no end. It is also a strange mix of growls, horns, percussion and synth (bringing to mind the movies of John Carpenter), doing its job perfectly. But for all the praise I have for You're Next, the story lets it down, becoming predictable as the movie enters the home stretch. Leaving the attackers motiveless and faceless would have been a better call, as they worked best when we didn't anything about them.
Not entirely perfect, You're Next is a fantastic feature debut from a promising new voice in horror, presenting a great new take on a often seen genre.
