Bad Things
Even in the snows of January it never rains but it pours, Ruthie having unexpectedly inherited a run-down hotel from her grandmother and now making the decision whether to try and bring it up to mid-market standard and run it as a going concern or just to sell it as is, arriving with her girlfriend Cal and their friends Maddie and Fran to try and assess the situation and the work needed and make a decision.
Ruthie in a bad headspace, the reading of the will the first time in seven years she had seen her estranged mother, her relationship with Cal is already rocky, and while Maddie tells Cal that she thinks she would be better off alone Fran’s erratic and impulsive behaviour is also making things awkward, pining over Ruthie one moment then claiming she sees ghosts when she is knocked back.
Drifting through the corridors and lobbies of the Comley Suites, Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, Rad Pereira and Annabelle Dexter-Jones are Ruthie, Cal, Maddie and Fran, succumbing to the temptation of Bad Things, written and directed by Stewart Thorndike and also featuring Jared Abrahamson as Brian, the handyman who occasionally shows up hoping to find Ruthie’s mom in the hotel which boasts that only five guests have died in thirty years and The Breakfast Club’s Molly Ringwald as the internet marketing guru whose success Ruthie hopes to emulate.
Any resemblance to The Shining presumably intentional but largely superficial, with the sinister mystery of Suite 324 which Ruthie insists the others not enter, the breakfast room crowded by visitors from a bygone era who vanish in the blink of an eye and the twinned apparitions who lurk in the hallways, the drama comes less from the past of the hotel as the heavy baggage the visitors have brought with them, behaving more like unsupervised teenagers driven by hormones and grudges than supposedly responsible adults.
With Ruthie manipulative, deceitful and bullying and Fran irrational, needy and prone to attention seeking, the four meander, mumble and bumble their way through the empty corridors of the hotel and the dead ends of their relationships, feeling less like the promised Bad Things and more like four people who arrived early making small talk while waiting for the main event to begin, positioned as a horror but playing more like a nineties arthouse film of ennui and disillusionment where even chainsaw killings seem as drab as the beige decor.
The discovery of a dead body somehow failing to shake things up, the women continuing to bicker and staying another night without calling the police, like The Resort this feels like an idea conceived around the availability of a filming location rather than a premise developed and honed, but even then the eerie potential of a space constructed for habitation now bereft of the human warmth which gives it purpose is squandered, the supposed isolation which discourages them from leaving belied by the busy road visible beyond the entrance.
Bad Things will be available on Shudder from Friday 18th August
