Some Kind of Hate (2015)
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Grace Phipps, Ronen Rubinstein, Sierra McCormick
Directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer
Want to curb the current rampant bullying problem in the world today? I’ve got the simplest solution – sit said bully down in front of a big screen TV, and press play on Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Some Kind of Hate. Is it flawed? A little bit. Is it effective? Oh yeah!
Lincoln Taggart (Rubinstein) is an outcast, no doubt about it; and his days are spent dodging social experiences and the occasional bully at school, not to mention an obviously imbalanced father (Andrew Bryniarski in an intensified cameo). After an unfortunate brawl at school, which sees Lincoln planting a dinner fork into his tormentor’s cheek, he is whisked off to a cult-like youth camp/reform school for misguided teens. He immediately befriends a couple of fellow miscreants in Isaac (Spencer Breslin) and Kaitlin (Phipps), almost representing a skewered normalcy in all three’s relationship.
Well, it doesn’t take long before Lincoln finds himself once again the bullied one, as Willie (Maestro Harrell) acts as the new antagonist, followed by a small grouping of fellow goons. After yet another scarring interaction, Lincoln runs off into the safety of a cellar and wishes Willie to be dead. Unbeknownst to him, he inadvertently conjures up the vengeful spirit of a girl, Moira (McCormick), who herself was the victim of bullying years before and decided to end her life via a straight razor.
Moira is hell-bent on making all of these bullies pay dearly – she can’t be reasoned with, and she won’t cease until their blood is spilled, and interestingly enough, she doesn’t even need to lay a finger on her victims. Once she inflicts damage to herself (razor cuts to various parts of her anatomy, or simply bashing her skull against a wall), the damage is mirrored onto whomever she is focusing her anger upon. Lincoln’s dilemma now is not only trying to harness Moira’s uncontrollable rage, but contending with a dwindling population around him, and his new love interest, Kaitlin, is directly in the line of fire.
This vaults completely around the usual “teen horror” drivel that’s been inundating the market lately, and goes straight for the jugular (literally) with its message. The mood is dour, and the sentiment is even darker – this is about a girl who was tormented until she died, and now she’s back to seek revenge, and while that tagline has been used to some varied extent in films past, this movie takes it to another level, and it’s grotesquely effectual in its delivery. Moira isn’t your typical evil-doing slasher – she once was an innocent girl wrapped up in the growing plague of bullying, and she paid for it with her life, ending up in a sympathetic look at a soul driven to suicide.
Mortimer doesn’t drag the performances out of his actors, meaning a much less hokey depiction of an assemblage of today’s youth, and essentially putting their problems into focus, without shoving them down our throats. The performances all around the board are rock solid and believable to a high extent.
Overall, Some Kind of Hate is one of those watches that will not only make gorehounds howl at the moon, but will also send a strong message about a problem that is quickly traveling out of control in this day and age – recommended.
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Film
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