source: Ladyworld

I cannot understand why this movie has such a poor rating. It's definitely for the art house crowd, there's no denying that. However, when taking on a whole, the movie has much more than it seems to show on the surface. The other reviewers comparing it to Lord of the Flies are correct, with a similar vibe, just in a "disaster strikes at a birthday slumber party" way. I'm not saying this movie is great, because it's not. What it is, is an interesting representation of what happens to people left to their own devices in a crisis situation. Watch it for the acting, which is very good, and don't read too much into it, and you might actually enjoy this movie.

What if Lord of the Flies only had women? That's pretty much the question posed by this 2018 movie, which was directed by Amanda Kramer. The film begins with a disorienting earthquake that soon finds eight teenage girls trapped in a house together. As supplies begin to run low, so does their grip on reality and sanity. One of the characters, Dolly, says "We're not boys. We're not brutal." That's not true. After all, I've had numerous young boys punch me in the face and I can't remember their names, while the slings and arrows of women hurt you way worse and are so much more memorable. Soon, Olivia (Gert from Marvel's Runaways) and Piper (Annalise Basso, Oculus and Ouija: Origin of Evil) are vying for leadership over the pack of girls, who are soon dressed in increasingly strange and more fashion-forward costumes. Their world is dominated by worries of further earthquakes and the potential of a man who may have snuck into the house. Ryan Simpkins, who was the young co-lead alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby, plays Dolly. Maya Hawke, who was such a breakout actress on the most recent season of Stranger Things, also appears. The film comes off as quite similar to a stage play. Your willingness to deal with its long pauses and extended takes will determine how much you enjoy it, as well as how much you can deal with artier films. Don't go in expecting a slasher movie.

What drew me to this movie, first and foremost, was the cast. I've been a huge fan of actress Annalise Basso, who played Piper, for several years now. I'm also a fan of Ariela Barber, who played Olivia, who I had seen in a movie that she had done when she was much younger. It was nice to see her in something as a young adult with more mature material to work with. As much as I liked the premise of a close-quarters character study set in a very limited setting, how the movie actually played out (at least to me) was equal parts underwhelming and confusing. Scenes of tension and/or peril would start only to cut to more slow and mundane scenes out of the blue, sometimes right in the middle of the previous scene. It probably would've also been better of they had fleshed out the start and the aftermath of the earthquake a little better. One positive that I will give to this movie is that it looked to me like a mixture of The Shining and Suspiria, what with its deliberately haunting music and frazzled tempo.

Honestly one of the worst movies Ive ever seen. It's weird, annoying, cheap... I would feel bad if I'd have created this film knowing people paid for it to watch.

An effing waste of time on a try hard Arthouse piece of trash. What was the point of the movie? Bad acting and direction.

Plot hole first, then actual review. They can get out at any time. The windows are piled up with dirt, but not to the top. That means they could break a window and climb out over the dirt that would then spill in freeing themselves from the house. While all the girls/women in this are decent in their roles, and their acting is good enough to be enjoyable I found the actual script to be much less than stellar. The sound in this movie is the worst thing I've heard in years. Literal years. The sound director should be fired and never work again. The sound was jarring, played for minutes longer than it ever needed to play for, and felt like it didn't belong with any of the shots they were set in. Even the few sounds that did make sense were overly long and thus became jarring. My 3 stars are for the acting only. These peoples' descent into madness and base instinct didn't work for me. Maybe the glaring plot hole was just too much, maybe the half naked women running around was too gratuitous, even without being actually naked? It's all basically came down to 7 women being terrible to each other for no reason. Watch it if you feel the need, like I said the acting is fair.

This film is getting a lot of unnecessary politically charged criticism that has really nothing to do with what makes this film "broken" for a lack of a better word. The acting is so-so. I at least believe them often enough that I forgive a bad reading here or there. There are plenty of loose metaphors scattered about and really this is the main issue. This film wanders in a setting that's to small to really get going. And there is the major "elephant in the room"... regrading the windows.... ugh. I get it "wUt iF wE GEt cOMfoRtableeeeeee." If you watch a lot of movies already give this a shot maybe you'll get something out of it. If you're a more casual viewer skip it Its 'Lord of the flies' meets 'The Hole'

Those windows open inward ladies!!!! Just pull them open and crawl out!!! Unless the moral of the story is that teenage girls are all mindless idiots, this was really disappointing. You're trapped in a house for days without food and you don't even try to break a window... Don't waste our time with this garbage. Seriously, you can see the hinges on the windows that suggests they would just swing open. Massive oversight

I created an IMDB account just to review this movie: This movie is a total waste of your time. Everything feels cheap about it, its annoying, and it does not have any sense of story. And it doesn't make sense. Please just watch something else, if you are intrigued by my review, just skip through the movie and you will understand what I mean. Hate to say it, garbage.