Bad Things review – sharp gender-flipped horror is queer remix of The Shining
American director Stewart Thorndike’s horror film is a gender-flipped and queered remix of The Shining, complete with a pair of creepy spectres (joggers this time) and an ominous fixation on a particular hotel room. Ruthie (Glow’s Gayle Rankin) turns up for a weekend break at her mother’s snowbound resort, which she is in line to inherit, with three friends. She, girlfriend Cal and pal Maddie (trans actors Hari Nef, recently seen in Barbie, and Rad Pereira) just want to loll around the pool and have fun. But antsy Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), who mistakenly believed she had cancer, won’t settle down and seems to have designs on Ruthie.
Thorndike couches proceedings in an aura of generalised hipsterdom – Cal is never seen without her Hole Tshirt, while the fluorescent-green title design is purloined from Twin Peaks – that is suffocating for the film’s first 15 minutes. But gradually it becomes apparent that the snide repartee, emanating chiefly from Ruthie, is the result of a kind of emotional constipation that events in the hotel’s pastel corridors seem to be trying to shake loose. While Ruthie is hooked on watching Ted-style talks from a scarlet-suited hospitality guru (Molly Ringwald), strange happenings hint at deeper levels of psychic disturbance: breakfast-lounge denizens manifest themselves to Fran, or a chainsaw-wielding maniac in a hoodie.
The initial archness is irritating and keeps the horror elements at safely ironic distance, almost as if it’s a game the characters vicariously enjoy. But Thorndike slowly generates greater levels of feeling as Bad Things reveals how the paranormal is a product of Ruthie’s internal conflicts, culminating in a business meeting scene that corresponds nicely to Jack Torrance’s Lloyd-the-bartender hallucinations in The Shining.
Some of the storytelling gets clotted, leaning too much on the girls shrilly screaming at each other. Bad Things, though, is sharply filmed, with cinematographer Grant Greenberg feng-shuiing the hotel spaces into tonesetting tableaux (with a touch of Twin Peaks’ kitsch). This movie is a longterm occupancy filled with shivers of twentysomething anxiety and maternal oppression.
• Bad Things is on Shudder from 18 August.