The “Home Invasion” flick is quite possibly one of the most intense subsets of the horror genre, after-all what is more frightening than masked people invading the safe space of your home and then literally terrorizing and/or possibly murdering you?
And let’s be honest here, the reason that it is so scary of a genre (at least to me) is that it is rooted in reality and could actually happen (if you were terribly unlucky) so naturally, there isn’t a whole lot of “suspension of disbelief” needed to scare you shitless.
The moment the power is knocked out, or the creaking sound of weight moving along a floor is heard in one of these movies, you know what you’re in for.
The only question is, is the movie going to live up to the rules/promise/precedent that is the “Home Invasion” genre.
In Masquerade a young girl (Alyvia Alyn Lind) fights to survive a home invasion after art thieves break in to steal her family’s extensive, priceless art collection.
As set-ups go, it’s a good one and something that hasn’t been done to death (no pun intended). The novelty of combining the standard art heist movie with horror lends itself to originality, but unfortunately it is a set up that is left unfulfilled by a bland script and wooden acting that is extremely boring, something that is a severe no-no for a film of this nature.
Bella Thorne co-stars as Rose, a waitress who seems to be heading up the home invasion crew by keeping tabs on the home owners (Austin Nichols) who are attending a fundraiser.
Rose not only watches the home owners, she also interacts and integrates herself with them while their daughter Casey is being hunted down at their home unbeknownst to them. Splitting the movie between the psychological stalking of the home owners and the actual physical stalking of their daughter should have been an epic scary delight, but it falls incredibly short on both accounts.
The pacing of the movie between the two plot points stutters between being yawn-worthy and just plain confusing. Not knowing the reasoning behind a home invasion until the end is standard practice, but at least make it an interesting and comprehensible ride.
At 80-minutes, you have to have a compact, tightly plotted film if it’s going to be worthy of such a short running time and you have to maximize both the scares and the exposition.
As a viewer you know that there are certain formulaic steps to a Home Invasion movie that you can count on and in the capable hands of a good director and actors, the playing around with these foundational steps can lead to a non-formulaic, formula movie (think, You’re Next, Intruders, Don’t Breathe), but Masquerade doesn’t even really bother to establish any steps, which leaves it feeling rudderless. I could forgive it’s boringness and weird pacing, but couple that with acting that feels like a first time, out loud script read-through and you have an over-all pointless horror film with zero scares.
Lind, as Casey, is the only actor in the movie who seems to be giving an actual performance but in doing so, she only manages to highlight just how barren and shallow the script really is.
Thorne phones it in which is a shame. I like Thorne and enjoy a lot of her performances and I feel like, when given a good script, she can deliver. Here, she merely takes up space on the screen (along with the rest of the cast who are so unmemorable that it’s a good thing they are masked for 90% of the movie so they can only exist as “shapes” rather than characters) until the very end when the reasoning of the home invasion is revealed.
Let me say something here, a lot of the problems I have with horror movies are the endings.
I have watched way too many films where the scripts are completely great for the first ¾ of the movie only to epically fail in the last 10-15 minutes.
Masquerade suffers from the reverse. It’s ending had a hell of a twist, which, in more capable hands, could have really been something special. But in this case, it’s not so much a payoff as a WTF moment that made you feel like you missed something important. In fact, it is such a letdown because of how good the ending could have been had the rest of the movie rose to the occasion. It’s incredibly disappointing to know that there was a possibly great movie lurking here if only it could have been made/acted by different people (Masquerade would have worked really well as a mumblegore horror flick if it had been headed up by the cast and crew of Ti West, Amy Seimetz, the Duplass Bros, Adam Wingard, Joe Swanberg or AJ Bowen).
As a result of its awfulness, I wouldn’t pay to watch Masquerade on VOD or in theaters, but it is worth it for the ending on streaming.
That way, when the reveal happens you can get mad that the film screwed itself by not being better. Then, you can go put on a better home invasion flick (like Hush or Silent House or Funny Games or…) to take the bad taste of this one out of your mouth.
*****
Produced by Shane Dax Taylor,
Steven Schneider, Kenneth Burke
Written and Directed by Shane Dax Taylor
Starring Bella Thorne, Alyvia Alyn Lind,
Austin Nichols, Mircea Monroe, Skyler Samuels
Masquerade is playing in theaters, On Demand and Digital HD starting today.
