Last year, I reviewed Alison Locke’s The Apology. It was a grim, claustrophobic chamber drama where violent secrets came to light during a Christmas Eve snowstorm. Anna Gunn and Linus Roache were sensational, their slow unfurling of secrets and hidden hostilities elevating what amounted to a stage play with bouts of violence. It’s obviously incidental that Kyle Butenhoff’s Laced, which played at this year’s 2023 Panic Fest, feels so thematically and tonally similar to Locke’s directorial debut. Yet, that familiarity is hard to shake, not because one deserves to be compared against the other, but because Laced does so little with snowstorm convention, especially accounting for how well a first-time filmmaker accomplished it months before.
Dana Mackin stars as Molly, a belabored and allegedly abused wife who, at the urging of her mistress, Victoria (Hermione Lynch), plans to kill her husband, Charlie (Butenhoff, also starring). It doesn’t take long for Molly to follow through, and soon thereafter, Victoria arrives to help her get away with it. From the get, the psychological framework necessary for this material to work is inexplicably absent. Charlie, we’re told from the synopsis, is terribly abusive. While I appreciate Butenhoff’s restraint in depicting intimate partner violence—a realm of horror that regularly veers toward the exploitative—audiences are given absolutely nothing to conceptualize his violence. Sure, Charlie drinks, but the inceptive interactions with Molly, while conflict-prone, don’t suggest a profile mandating murder.
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If performances in Laced were stronger, the suggestion of violence might have sufficed. Mackin, however, is too stoic, reciting shelter pamphlet lines about abuse without a dynamic performance to match. It’s never clear that Charlie has had any kind of impact on Molly, let alone enough to warrant murder. Too often, the characterization is plot-driven. Molly is beholden to a script, not a dimensional portrait of abuse. Worse still, the stilted love affair with Victoria incites further questions. The pair share little chemistry, and at times, it’s outright hostile. Again, the plot drives their dyadic exchanges, not a commitment to character. That Molly would kill Charlie at Victoria’s behest is never believable. Victoria is too villainous from the start, spouting Criminal Minds unsub lines about disposing of evidence and chopping up bodies. It’s the equivalent of Molly having an affair with Henry Lee Lucas and never noticing anything askew.
Contextual elements don’t fare considerably better. There is a snowstorm keeping them trapped, though interior staging never suggests inclement weather right outside. Credulity is compounded as characters repeatedly arrive at the rural home where all of the action occurs. While they remark on the beast of a storm outside, it’s never so beastly as to impede their travel. Visual elements—staging, lighting—are competent without excelling. It’s workmanlike, though with so few players and one key setting, audiences have few visual cues to really latch onto.
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Some zest is injected with the late arrival of Zach Tinker’s Austin, brother to Molly. Their dynamic is engaging, even if the thrust of Laced’s tension is rooted in Zack’s proximity to the crime. That it arrives so late in the film despite accounting for its sole source of drama is frustrating at best.
As a springboard for future genre projects, everyone involved in Laced yields promise. Lynch is sufficiently menacing at times, and both Tinker and Mackin have endearing chemistry. Butenhoff has the nugget of engaging high-concept horror here, though it never coalesces into anything beyond nascent suggestions of other, more accomplished properties. That I was repeatedly reminded of The Apology or The Invisible Man, at times wishing I was watching those instead, is telling. Laced will find an audience among more casual viewers, thriller fans looking for some sufficient jolts and unease. For everyone else, Laced is, well, too laced with the DNA of other, better movies to warrant much of a recommendation.
Summary
Laced has some solid ideas, but uneven performances and nebulous tension keep it trapped in the memory of better domestic thrillers.
Tags: laced Panic Fest panic fest 2023
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