Review: Death of Me

Happily married couple Maggie Q and Luke Hemsworth wake up in their Thai AirBnB room on vacation with zero memory of the night before and a typhoon (and missing passports) preventing them from leaving. Viewing phone camera footage from the previous night yields dark and disturbing results. It shows the couple engaging in romantic interplay before Hemsworth snaps and violently murders his wife. What the hell? Soon, Q finds herself vomiting dirt. A helpful AirBnB woman (Alex Essoe) tries to assist the couple in figuring things out, but it only gets stranger and more disturbing from there.

 

For someone who started out as kind of an action heroine-type, Maggie Q sure does seem to turn up in horror movies quite a bit. This 2021 Thailand-set horror pic from director  Darren Lynn Bousman (who has the distinction of directing the best and worst films in the “Saw” franchise, “Saw II” and the pitiful “Saw IV”) is a pretty damn good one. We start out with the lovely Ms. Q in her underwear, which is certainly not a bad way to begin. More importantly (and less sexist) we have a pretty irresistible horror/mystery premise, I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. Think a horror version of “The Hangover”, which was a premise I found horrific anyway. I was particularly happy that this rather disturbing film gets off and running very quickly. Perhaps a little too J-horror in the horror visuals department, but certainly weird and unusual enough to be interesting. At least for most of its length. It’s a bit of a shame that the final stretch is a touch too reminiscent of horror movies past because this could’ve been really special. However for the most part it’s at least a bizarre and interesting version of familiar horror tropes.

 

Perhaps a touch xenophobic, but ultimately pretty effective for what it is. Maggie Q and Aussie Luke Hemsworth (the best actor if least charismatic member of his family) are solid leads, and the film deserves more recognition/positive reviews in my opinion. One to look out for, though it’s a bit of an acquired taste perhaps. In other words, I appear to be the only person giving it a positive review. The screenplay is by Ari Margolis (whose previous writing effort was a 2001 comedy called “Black Days”), James Morley III (writer-director of “Black Days”, co-writer of Jim Wynorski’s “Final Voyage” with Ice-T and Erika Eleniak), and producer David Tish (his first script, he produced the Liam Neeson ice road trucker flick “The Ice Road”).

 

Rating: B-

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