User Reviews

Its professionally filmed, has believable dialogue for the most part, acted well enough (even if some choices were a bit much), has moments of levity, does just okay to hide it's limited budget, with a pretty unmemorable score except for some strange clicking/knocking cue that sounds too much like a sound effect every time that it gets confusing, and...

Well... Its fine. The movie's fine, its fine enough... it's competent enough... until it's not. Then for anything good the film may have had in it's favor is totally gone once we get to the last quarter of the movie where it speedrails into Lifetime Movie territory.

It tries to introduce "fake out suspects" except they don't work when the movie gives most of it's screen time to just 3 people. And the red herrings didn't quite sell since we never get to really see the varying effects of the protagonist on her meds, off the meds, having missed a dose, or whatnot.

Aside from some restless sleep and hearing noises (that other characters have confirmed are real) she is pretty much the same level of antsy, scared, happy, sad, calm, or curious throughout the film.

But the biggest Lifetime Movie culprit is the usual bonkers 3rd Act:

...The villain Batman's in and out of locations, the protagonist loses sight of someone and just darts her eyes rather than turn her head like a normal person, the checklist of evil deeds are called out for the villain to confirm, and normal things the protagonist did just fine only minutes earlier are suddenly rocket surgery to figure out (like how to open an unlocked door to leave*).

*I swear I rewound that moment like a dozen times and still can't understand what reason there was to suddenly not be able to open the front door.

OTHER HEAD SCRATCHERS:

-- The girl would have smelled the ungodly stench that dead rats give off long before she accidentally grabbed it.

-- In a particular scene, the roommate snaps at a girl for taking so long to arrive and then to geez call 911 already (when she could have done so herself at anytime earlier).

-- Who's dead body is that in the freezer? Why is there a dead body in the freezer? She has pink hair, I don't recall anyone with pink hair in the film.

-- Girl backs herself up toward the fridge when she already knows from an earlier scene that there is a hole in the wall behind it where the villain could jump out from.

-- Why are movie final girls always such LOUD mouth breathers?

Lastly, this movie had the added effect of making Google think I had a drug problem.... Because when I went to look up what the side effects were to withdrawal from alprazolam (the medication the protagonist is taking), it first auto-corrected my search into just the "side effects of" using the drug. Then when I reiterated "withdrawal from", instead of showing me relevant results it offered me a 3-digit suicide crisis line to call along with some help sites to seek treatment.

Thanks movie. ;p.

Amelia (Rebecca Liddiard) is an unreliable narrator, if you will. She's just getting over a bad breakup - maybe - with a man who was wrong for her - perhaps - and is trying to improve her mental health. Or stop taking her pills and ignoring every time her mother calls. She's found her way to a rougher part of the city, living with a roommate named Melinda (Camille Stopps) who may have even more issues than she does.

And oh yes. Their house might be haunted.

Deadbolt is directed by Mars Horodyski and written by Michael Rinaldi (Meet the Killer Parents). It has a nice glossy look that doesn't betray its Tubi origins. And it does a great job of making us wonder who is really trying to drive its heroine even madder.

Amelia has to stay on her meds or she starts to hallucinate. This being a potentially haunted house, that's not a good thing. Nor is the fact that her ex-boyfriend Colin (Joey Belfiore) is continually stalking her, while Melinda's addict boyfriend Mark (Thomas Duplessie) keeps crashing on their couch and speaking of Melinda, what's with that rash that's overtaking her face?

There's a bright spot. Amelia meets an artist named David (Jamie Spielchuk) who is very protective of her in the face of everything she's dealing with, like rats in the basement, a fire in the neighborhood and Bruno (Bill MacDonald), a neighbor who seems threatening but is just dealing with dementia.

Sure, this seems like it could be a Lifetime movie, but is that a bad thing?

It didn't take me long to figure out what was going on. In fact, I guessed everything correctly. I knew that the mentioned side effects regarding her medication were a diversionary tactic, and I knew the house wasn't haunted. Yes, I knew someone lived behind the walls, and I also knew who it was. The reason I knew is because it's all been done a hundred times before. The only difference between this one and all the others is the film's feminist premise. A woman escaping from a manipulative man falls for a new manipulative man. Just a regular story in a regular woman's life, because all men are dangerous, right? But thankfully she survived and both men died, so women triumphed a little. I'm curious to see where she moves next and who she meets there. Let's have another round of good feminists and bad men.

3/10 because I watched it till the end.

This movie is pretty much like every other Hallmark Channel or Lifetime "thriller" EVER.

Troubled heroine? Check.

Possible psychological condition exacerbated by sporadic, reluctant use of proscribed medications with hallucinogenic side effects? Check.

Is her new home haunted, or is she suffering psychologically? Check.

Pesky, overbearing former boyfriend who refuses to let our heroine be? Check.

Nosy, intrusive, impossibly irritating mother who "only really means well"? Check.

New love interest for our heroine who seems too good to be true? Check.

Chinks start to form in the new love interest's facade? Check.

There is literally nothing new to see here... not one single thing. The lead actress gives a good performance, and that's the only reason why I gave this stale piece of cinematic white bread a "3". This is a generic, if-you've-seen-one-you've-seen-'em-all "thriller" that is predictably and typically predictable. The only "good" person in the movie is our heroine, who ends up having to save herself. Jeepers; who'd have ever seen that coming?

This mystery throws in everything but the kitchen sink. There are weird noises in the house, dead rats, strange neighbors, there's a weird roommate, Amelia's very suspicious new boyfriend, stalkers in the dark, Amelia's narcissistic ex. It was difficult to imagine that all this stuff would be tied up neatly in the conclusion.

Unfortunately, several key things were predictable. That the junkie is innocent was very obvious, because he was anyway a very marginal character. Amelia's new boyfriend was the very obvious killer early on. I don't know why they made this so obvious, though perhaps they thought it was well-hidden. I mean, well hidden from five-year-old viewers...

When the movie mentioned a shy boy in that family's demise, I immediately knew that it was him. Not only a predictable plot-twist, but a stupid one too. I am sick and tired of these omnipotent genius murderers, especially ones who are so completely normal and well-adjusted in private life. He shmoozed Amelia way too slickly for somebody who is completely insane. It's one thing to be a schmoozy psychopath, but completely another to be a smooth operator who has many screws loose.

The only thing I didn't know up until the very end was what kind of a stupid motive they'd give him. Of course I knew that it would be a stupid motive, because in these thrillers the killer usually has a ridiculous motive, I just didn't know what kind of nonsense they would concoct this time. But the movie was so lazy that that the writer couldn't even bother to think up of a proper motive. It turns out that Melanie was killed just because she saw David. And yet David was a murderer BEFORE this anyway, so what were his motives for killing the others? No explanation. Why did he kill that young blonde woman from before? This isn't explained either.

Very predictably David kills Amelia's ex, and then gets killed by her. In fact, I wrote this previous sentence BEFORE these events occurred, because I was so convinced that the movie was going to resort to all the usual serial killa-thrilla cliches. The way he kills her ex is utterly idiotic, which was totally predictable as well.

Amelia then does something that it is way too stupid. Right after David brutally kills her ex, in a scene that is incredibly dumb, she catches David in two successive lies, yet calls out his name from another room instead of being quiet and rushing for the door. When she does finally go for the door guess what? The door is locked. I did say that David is omnipotent, a walking movie cliche.

The way she kills David is preposterous. She lunges at him, with all of her 45 kilos, yet somehow manages to drive him all the way through a closed window, which he breaks due to the incredible force exerted by this 45-kilo woman, falling into a garbage bin - where this movie's script should have been waiting for him.

Melanie's character is too cartoonish. It's as if she is in a comedy, like she is playing this for laughs. She never comes off as a real person, just a sitcom caricature. Her reactions are too quirky all of the time. Her behavior even made me think during the first third that this was a comedy, which it definitely isn't.

The first half isn't bad but it sets us up for something much more interesting than the disappointing reveal of David being the generic thrilla-killer. It was predictable, as I said, but one still hoped that it wouldn't be the case. The last 20 minutes are just sheer idiocy in combination with very many cliches. That's a shame because Amelia's character was more interesting and likable than most such people in horror films.