Most Horrible Things

If you were single on Valentine’s Day and somebody offered you $10,000 dollars to attend a dinner party where they would try to fix you up with a prospective new partner, would you say yes? If so, you can’t have watched many horror movies. But perhaps you just want to make an impression. Perhaps you’re not especially successful and you imagine that you must have been invited to this swanky event by accident. It could be a fun chance to see how the other half lives; it could be an amazing opportunity to make connections. In that case you might take the huge gothic house and air of secrecy to be positive things.

For any viewer who doesn’t know what to expect, a bloody prologue provides a clue. As the camera wanders around the house, we hear a phone call to the emergency services, a voice which we will soon recognise as that of the dinner party’s host (Sean Sprawling). Later, the film cuts away from the action from time to time to show us the host and the butler being interrogated by two detectives, who don’t seem to be making a lot of headway. The mystery thus becomes not whether or not anything bad will happen to the dinner party guests, but which, if any, will survive.

There are only two women there for seasoned horror fans to place their bets on. One is a social media influencer – she’s not monstered as much as women like her in other recent films, so perhaps we are finally getting past that ugly misogynistic trope, but one gets the impression that certain other characters very much think of her that way. The other is a little shy and rather sweet. There are two straight guys, fairly interchangeable in their outward appearance, one of whom she clicks with straight away, perhaps because he feels a little awkward in that situation. Then there are two gay guys, one of whom attempts to strike a positive note at the outset by asserting that nobody there looks like a serial killer, which is ironic because he looks very much like cinema’s idea of a serial killer himself.

What follows is a series of awkward conversations which are apparently supposed to inspire personal breakthroughs on the part of each of the participants. Of course, the host knows a lot more about the guests than they realise. Of course, this is all part of a larger plan – one whose final manifestation may seem shocking to male viewers, but anyone who has had to deal with the creepy side of male behaviour in the past will see it coming a mile off, so it’s frankly suspicious that neither of the two female characters does. This is in line with other aspects of the film which attempt to pose valid critiques of certain kinds of social interaction but feel a bit forced in their execution.

The film is more focused on social commentary and psychological discomfort than on the bloody side of horror, though it does deliver a measure of that too. Its rather lurid colour palette, themed around Valentine’s Day, will no doubt help to make it stick in the mind, but there’s not much else here that really stands out. It’s a serviceable little after dinner thriller, but you won’t fall in love.