by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Elke Hinrichsen, Alyson Rudlin, Lexie Rose, Jock Campbell, Jesper Stenberg, Elodie Westhoff, Riley Klotz, Gordon Vignelles, Ben Weekes
Intro:
… quite fun if you don’t think about it too hard.
Backlash, the latest feature from prolific Australian filmmaker Jon Cohen, tees itself up as a cross between Saw and Free Guy, with a masked killer putting a group of cyber-bullies and enablers in a real-life deathmatch for survival. It has a sizeable atmosphere for an indie flick of its means (budget estimated at about $90k), with the disused hospital that makes up the bulk of the setting along with DP Stephanie Furdek’s camerawork through the cold and morbid colour palette letting the raw thrills of the premise sink in.
The writing, though, is a bit more complicated. The first third, introducing the main cast and the inciting incident leading to the main game, is both obnoxious in a 2000s-era horror film way, and laid-on so thick that it announces pretty much every major plot twist like airhorns in a Major League Gaming (MLG) montage.
The characterisation and dynamics might make some viewers break out in hives from the recollection of having dealt with persons of this calibre in their own school days, but they’re quite flat early on. The film makes an all-too-common mistake of presenting characters as immediately unlikeable to offset the gruesome things that will happen to them later (why care if they’re just going to die anyway?) but not compelling enough to want to watch until that inevitability occurs. The script even throws in a reference to what sounds like Saw V with the line “It’s like that shitty horror sequel where if they work together, they survive”, which is not only tempting fate but a bit rich, since those films, even at their lamest, still made their scumbags entertaining to watch.
Thankfully, once the actual game starts, things pick up quite a bit. It functions a lot better in the moment than as a connection to what came before (and especially what follows), showing an understanding of the need for sturdy pacing to keep things interesting. The soundtrack from Victor Spiegel does much to boost those nervy sensations, with rhythmic drum patterns that amp up that rush of the chase and the floor-drop-out despair of the catch.
But once again, the framing around these events and the characters involved keeps making it tricky to get into. More so than anything to do with philosophy of play and examining what people will do if they are convinced that the situation isn’t real and therefore doesn’t matter, this wants to be a cautionary parable about cyber-bullying. However, while online spaces like social media and gaming, with their pseudo-anonymity, are fertile grounds for people to feel free to be cruel to others without fear of recompense, getting that point across can often feel condescending or just plain corny; “just log off” is both one of the most frequent and one of the most practically unhelpful pieces of advice in this larger conversation, when society is increasingly reliant on constant access to such things.
To that end, Backlash gestures at similar messaging to films like 2016’s Nerve in its perspective on how that environment can alter people’s actions and behaviours, but it ends up saying worryingly little about the bigger problems involved. Its reach only gets as far as recognising that real-world issues can fuel an urge to lash out from behind a screen, which ends up playing into the self-victimhood narrative that actual victimisers regularly employ to excuse their own actions. Even the more likeable characters here, like Marnie (Elke Hinrichsen) and her interactions with her visually-impaired little sister JJ (Alyson Rudlin), run into this same problem. It feels stuck between a desire to address such things, and the vicarious satisfaction at seeing bad things happen to bad people that horror and horror-adjacent cinema regularly engages with.
Backlash runs into the same issues as The Hunt. Taken purely as a genre exercise, it’s quite thrilling; but as an attempt at societal commentary, its delivery and specific talking points are brittle, not helped by the annoying lack of subtlety in how they are presented and (seemingly) dissected. At best, it’s a film that’s quite fun if you don’t think about it too hard. At worst, it just taps into the same perverse dopamine hit behind the very actions it’s trying to point out. It’s clear that Jon Cohen is sitting on a lot of talent and drive within this genre space, but if the art needs a message (and that’s not even necessarily a requisite; escapism has its place too), the message itself needs to be stronger than this.
