On the outside, the director seemed to have done everything right: The visuals, camera work and chilly atmosphere checked all the right boxes for a promising horror movie. I was expecting the usual feeling of horror to set in soon. It never came.
The movie was boring as it was, but as a horror flick it failed its objectives entirely. I couldn't really see what exactly I, as a viewer, should be afraid of - and I think it's an unwritten rule that horror movies should give you SOMETHING to be afraid of, if only for an amusing while. The few supposedly horror elements (women's faint screams, the randomly bleeding bathroom armatures, the dark hallway) and moments (the shower-curtain scene, two girls getting sucked in by the mirror or something) were bland and not very terror inducing. The five rules the women in the story had to live by were simply stuff to fill the story and in the end didn't have any meaning to them at all, which was a weak extra that left you unimpressed. The same goes for the intermittently shown side story involving the main protagonist's boyfriend. The characters themselves were superficially drawn and did not inspire any sympathy whatsoever. This also didn't help you understand any of the protagonists' motives. In the end, this also made the ending to some sort of a confused mess.
All in all, the story was a horrible chaos. All the loose ends never came together for a satisfying and logical conclusion. Many of the storyline's threads led to nowhere - and it's obvious they weren't meant to obscure the main story either, because the main story was inadequately put together as a whole itself anyway. As a movie, this is less than mediocre, as a horror movie, this is a huge big FAIL.
The movie was boring as it was, but as a horror flick it failed its objectives entirely. I couldn't really see what exactly I, as a viewer, should be afraid of - and I think it's an unwritten rule that horror movies should give you SOMETHING to be afraid of, if only for an amusing while. The few supposedly horror elements (women's faint screams, the randomly bleeding bathroom armatures, the dark hallway) and moments (the shower-curtain scene, two girls getting sucked in by the mirror or something) were bland and not very terror inducing. The five rules the women in the story had to live by were simply stuff to fill the story and in the end didn't have any meaning to them at all, which was a weak extra that left you unimpressed. The same goes for the intermittently shown side story involving the main protagonist's boyfriend. The characters themselves were superficially drawn and did not inspire any sympathy whatsoever. This also didn't help you understand any of the protagonists' motives. In the end, this also made the ending to some sort of a confused mess.
All in all, the story was a horrible chaos. All the loose ends never came together for a satisfying and logical conclusion. Many of the storyline's threads led to nowhere - and it's obvious they weren't meant to obscure the main story either, because the main story was inadequately put together as a whole itself anyway. As a movie, this is less than mediocre, as a horror movie, this is a huge big FAIL.