91 min | R | October 30, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
A high-flying Atlanta lawyer survives a plane crash and wakes up in a stranger’s attic, his leg shattered and bound by an old woman who calls herself a healer. She practices hoodoo. He just wants to walk again. The premise has teeth, but the movie keeps pulling its punches.
Marquis T. Woods is a slick Atlanta lawyer who has spent his life running from his rural Appalachian roots. A plane crash drops him back into exactly the world he escaped. He wakes up in a stranger’s attic, his leg shattered and bound, cared for by an old woman who calls herself a healer. Mark Tonderai builds the setup around hoodoo and the conjure traditions of the Black rural South. The film is really about a successful Black man held captive by the heritage he abandoned and the body he can no longer control.
Omari Hardwick plays Marquis with sweat and panic and a slow-dawning horror. He spends most of the film immobilized and still finds ways to make the captivity physical. His best work happens in his eyes when he calculates escape routes that lead nowhere. Loretta Devine plays Eloise, the captor, with warmth that curdles into menace. She smiles while she binds wounds and that smile is the most frightening thing in the movie. John Beasley plays Earl, her silent husband, as a man who has seen this before and made his peace with it.
Tonderai directs from a script by Kurt Wimmer that borrows its bones from Misery and never hides the debt. The production design earns its keep. The attic prison is stuffed with bottles and bones and stitched effigies that the camera lingers on until the symbols stop being decoration and start feeling like threats. The score leans on low drones and Southern gospel to mark the gap between Marquis and the world that holds him. The editing rushes the back half and trades the patient dread of the first act for chase mechanics.
The film has a strong idea and a strong lead and not enough invention to sustain either. Every beat in the second half is the one you expect. The hoodoo trappings promise a horror rooted in something specific to this place and this culture and the script keeps reaching for generic captivity thrills instead. Marquis fights to escape a house. The more interesting film is about a man fighting to escape what the house represents, and Tonderai gestures at it without committing to it.