You're Next

The Davisons have money, a half-timbered vacation house at the end of a long dirt road, and four grown children who cannot get through one dinner without relitigating their childhoods. Then a crossbow bolt comes through the dining room window and buries itself in a guest’s forehead, and the evening improves considerably.

What follows is a home invasion picture in which the invaders, wearing cheap animal masks and moving with the confidence of men who have done this before, discover they have made one error in their planning. The error’s name is Erin. She is the Australian girlfriend of the mopey middle son, she has said perhaps forty words at the table, and she was raised on a survivalist compound by a father who apparently believed the apocalypse was a scheduling matter.

There is a sequence in the second act that tells you everything about this movie’s intentions. Erin has been to the kitchen for knives and whatever else will do. A window explodes inward, knocking her flat, and her armory scatters across the floor. A man in a tiger mask steps through the empty window with an axe. She rolls. The axe sticks in the floorboards. Before he can work it free she kicks him in the groin, gets a hand on the meat tenderizer that landed near her, and from her back swings it into the side of his knee. The leg folds. She gets up. She finishes the job, and then she finishes it twice more, because she is not an idiot.

I cheered. The whole business takes under a minute. A worse film would have had her hit him once and run, then send her back later to check whether he was really dead, which is the oldest and laziest way to buy a jump scare. This movie has her behave the way you and I would like to believe we’d behave, and it turns out that is enormously entertaining. Die Hard understood the appeal of the competent nuisance decades earlier. Give the audience a hero with grit and a brain and the audience will follow that hero anywhere. Horror keeps forgetting this, which is why the killers are the ones on the T-shirts.

Erin is not Wonder Woman. Later she is upstairs when she hears someone coming, whirls, throws the tenderizer, and without waiting to see whether it lands she runs full speed through a second-story window. The throw misses. Sharni Vinson hit the mark in rehearsal and blew it on the take, and director Adam Wingard, working fast and broke, kept it. He should thank her. The miss makes the leap look like a decision instead of a stunt. She lands with a shard of glass the size of a shoe in her thigh and limps for the rest of the picture. Bruce Willis spent an entire Christmas Eve barefoot.

The tone is the trick, and it is a hard one. The movie is funny but the characters play it straight. Drake, the insufferable eldest, learns that his sister’s boyfriend’s films have screened “primarily at underground festivals” and asks, deadpan, if that means they show them underground. After Erin brains the invader, she rips off the mask and asks the family if they recognize him. No, they say, but “it’s kinda hard to tell.” The violence follows the same rule. It is wet and close and done in camera, and it is calibrated a few degrees toward slapstick. One victim absorbs a screwdriver to the chest and simply stands there with the affronted look of a diner who has been overcharged. The killer adds another implement. Then another. Then another. Eventually the victim’s torso resembles a pegboard and his expression remains indignant as the killer, exasperated, says, “Would you just die already? This is hard enough for me.” By the third act somebody’s skull is going into a blender, and the blender gets plugged in. There is a difference between a filmmaker showing you something with a grin and one rubbing your nose in it. This one grins.

Barbara Crampton plays the mother, made up ten years older than she is, with an austere haircut and a talent for underplaying that horror fans have known about since From Beyond. Watch how she takes the news about her children. Joe Swanberg gets the only other real arc as Drake, who takes a bolt in the back and finds his humility. Ti West and Larry Fessenden turn up, one as a boyfriend and one as a neighbor, and half the cast directs for a living. The killers all speak in Southern accents, which does more work on the subject of class than any line of dialogue could have.

But the film belongs to Vinson. Writer Simon Barrett added her nationality to the character after she was cast, and it was a smart move. A survivalist compound is one thing, but an Australian survivalist compound is another thing entirely. The killers never had a chance. Vinson takes a genuine beating and stays charismatic throughout; by the end she’s bloodied and bandaged and limping but with her hair still looking fantastic, which is the specific brand of glamour action movies run on. She is the best final girl I have seen, and it is not a close race.

I have watched You’re Next several times and I have yet to find a single thing I would change. It is scary, it is funny, and I still cheer at the tenderizer.