phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2023

Sick



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2022
Runtime: 1h 23m
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: Due to the pandemic, Parker and her best friend decide to quarantine at the family lake house alone - or so they think.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: A lean, mean slasher film. Sort of Scream (without the meta) meets The Strangers (without the nihilism), and a 2020 period piece where COVID is a plot point. I'm not sure the big reveal holds up, but the non-stop thrill ride totally makes up for it. Excellent example of how less is more, and what you can do with a single location.


Outside Reviews:

Simon Abrams
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Hyams ("Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning," "Alone") excels at stringing viewers along, immersing us in whatever room or outdoor setting that Parker and her friends fly through, and then occasionally snapping us out of our complacency with giddy violence. When I interviewed Hyams a few years ago, he told me that he thinks a movie only comes together in the editing room. "Sick" is more evidence for Hyams' by-now standard theory. Williamson's name may conjure certain associations, but this is Hyams' show, an impressive showcase for vivid sound design, unsparingly hard cuts, and genuinely surprising violence. There are very few working genre filmmakers who consistently deliver enough cattle-prod jolts to keep you on the edge of your seat. Hyams is that good at setting viewers up just so he can repeatedly knock us down.


Adrian Horton
3 out of 5 stars - Scream creator's Covid-era slasher is efficiently nasty

It's all standard but relatively well-structured stuff, particularly as the bloodshed begins to rain down in a well-paced rhythm of attack, respite, scream and scramble until a twist that is genuinely unexpected if a bit far-fetched, even for the genre. (And that's all I can say.) Compared with last summer's Scream-aspiring cabin horror hit Bodies Bodies Bodies, whose balance of humor and gore I preferred, Sick has a more pointed, less foreseeable reveal and looser handle on its characters.