"Fear" should have feared itself and not been made

Fear (2023)

The tiniest nugget of a promising idea exists in “Fear,” a generic pandemic-set horror film where, you guessed it, there’s nothing to fear but fear itself. Or, is fear like a viral pandemic like COVID? Well, "Fear" wants to have it all ways, only to commit a self-own: there is no fear here. Director Deon Taylor (who has made some enjoyable trash, primarily “The Intruder”) brings along another diverse cast (including Andrew Bachelor and TIP “T.I.” Harris) with his latest mid-budget thriller but little else. It's unevenly acted, poorly paced, visually muddy, and not even scary in a lazy jump-scare sort of way. 

As social distancing restrictions are lifted during a pandemic, best-selling author Rom Jennings (Joseph Sikora) surprises his girlfriend Bianca (Annie Ilonzeh) at a historical country lodge to catch up with their friends for her belated birthday weekend. He was supposed to propose to her, too, but Rom is afraid it’s never the perfect time. As one does, the friends go around at a fire pit, making a pact and letting go of their most personal fears (losing control after a car accident, blood, drowning, etc.). After they cheers with a wine bottle given to them by the dead-looking grounds lady Miss Wrenrich (Michele McCormick), they all realize it’s gone bad and begin hallucinating around the lodge. By morning, a newscast reports that a new strain of the virus has contaminated the air. Do they stay or do they go? Is there really another virus, or have the tortured souls of the burned witches from the lodge's haunted history had something in store for them since Rom and his pals got there? Great questions, but the answers aren’t interesting in the least. 

At the bare minimum, “Fear” could have been a fun pick-‘em-off slasher, but director Taylor and co-writer John Ferry bite off more than they can chew when they can’t even get the basics down. As this is a movie about friends and their fears, who are these underwritten stick figures anyway? One is a nurse, another has a child at home, and the one played by rapper T.I. keeps coughing, but they don’t have any other distinguishing traits, nor is it established how close these friends are in a way that would make us care. Perhaps we don’t need to care because, as fear takes hold, characters separate and some are nearly forgotten about before becoming mere fodder to the virus, or fear itself, or whatever the threat is supposed to be here when shoddily visualized as swirling supernatural nonsense. 

“I feel like we’re in ‘Get Out’ right now,” one Black character jokes. Maybe at first, but that film was clever and smartly written, making us genuinely tense for the characters and having something more relevant and cohesive to say about fear. Instead, director Taylor resorts to so many tired scare tactics, like bad electricity, staticky videos, bloody noses, and characters sneaking up on each other, that the film begins to feel entirely like ineffective hand-me-downs. The payoff is narratively and thematically confused, and not only is it a cop-out, but it’s cynical at best and irresponsible at worst, slapping the words, “Don’t Fear,” on the screen at the end. For a horror movie with either the most definitive or blandest title, “Fear” is negligible, and it is also bad but not even bad in a fun way.

Grade: D 

Screen Media is releasing “Fear” (98 min.) on demand April 25, 2023.