There's Someone Inside Your House (2021)

Park is so beautiful. Anyway, she has this melancholia about her I think really works. I think she is a great reason why I moved my rating to a 3 star from 2 and a half. I just liked her. I think she gets it across, this albatross emotionally regarding bearing this weight of guilt and trying to get up and live day to day when its obvious she's in pain.

Slasher films, I get, are built on secrets and the killer typically either uses the past as a reason to kill and the secret of his or her concealed identity to rack up a body count. In this film, the killer develops masks with specific faces that shock the victims being pursued and (almost all) stabbed. Park is a Hawaiian transplant to Nebraska, running away from a tragedy involving a hazing gone horribly wrong, with a guy totally into her (Pellerin), Park's friends believe is a school-shooter type. I noticed this was brought up in dialogue on Euphoria recently, so that is alarming to me. Because in this film Pellerin is just assumed to be the killer; particularly, when Park finds a stungun, she fully believes he is the one, as the killer nearly sets her on fire in her own house (I wonder how he was able to get in her room, but I digress...).

Josef's Ro(drigo) chosen a victim, regarding a pill addiction, seemed to be a harsh penalty used against him by the killer, while Katie (for her racist podcast) and the opening victim, Jackson (an altercation with a serious pummeling to another football player) seem to at least have more serious "sins" against them. Alex and Darby are friends of Park's Makani, and they never face any peril, even at the end when they seem to disappear. I thought Alex and Darby never facing any threat was curious since slashers typically introduce a cast and, at some point, all of the members of it are stalked at the very least. Alex was Ro's love interest, often voicing her frustrations about life in general and Darby desperately wants to get into NASA college. And the Zach character has a corn farm capitalist father buying out land across this local Nebraska rural town/county...Zach introduces a party of friends to his dad's Nazi collection, including how he uses some of the devices as bongs!

Lots of smoking weed, and high school angst. Some of the knife violence (and a sword is introduced later) is well done, especially the sliced Achilles, throat, and stomach of three victims. The sword into the neck (protruding out of the top of the head) of the corn farms capitalist buying up the lands of frustrated locals and offering to replace the police with private security (he gets plenty of negative treatment in the film since he throws his financial weight around as others struggle) might get a big, Hell, Yeah.

The killer's reasons for killing the last victim -- he really wanted to tell him off in epic style but the words weren't there leaving him outraged! -- and how enraged he was that everyone looked at him as this rich, privileged kid didn't do anything for me. I dunno: I think Park has a great film ahead of her, and this slasher just wasn't that. The name of the film is also rather ho-hum. Secrets and sins will always be slasher themes, but I guess I felt this film didn't really use them to any great effect. And what happened to Park, that big secret, her pushing another student during a hazing into a bonfire because the seniors had gotten her really drunk didn't exactly seem to be as significant a development to warrant all the poor girl's misery...if anything, the seniors were to blame for that hazing shit.