Ruin Me (FrightFest 2017)
Gareth Jones
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Starring Marcienne Dwyer, Matt Dellapina, Chris Hill, Eva Hamilton
Directed by Preston DeFrancis
Recovering drug addict Alex (Dwyer) isn’t much of a horror fan, but her boyfriend Nathan (Dellapina) is – and so when one of Nathan’s friends becomes unavailable at the last minute, Alex agrees to tag along for a visit to Slasher Sleepout.
A modern extreme horror experience, Slasher Sleepout sees a group of willing participants spend 36 hours together in the woods, as they attempt to decipher riddles and solve puzzles whilst being regularly harassed by the company’s cavalcade of actors.
As you’d expect in this kind of horror setup, the participants – consisting of Alex, Nathan, sexed-up goth couple Pitch (John Odom) and Marina (Hamilton), Larry (Hill), and Tim (Cameron Gordon) – are soon forced to question just what is real and what is fake. As people begin to disappear in the night and physical harm delivered by supposed actors goes far beyond anything a paying punter should expect, cries of the appointed safe word go unheeded.
When Alex is abducted and wakes up on a beach next to an old friend from one of her pre-rehab days, it looks like something far more serious than a horror-themed getaway is happening here – but who is behind it, and how can Alex and the now wounded Nathan escape?
Similarities in construction to the likes of The Game, and the more recent Fear, Inc., don’t seem to have any negative effect on Preston DeFrancis’ approach to his material in Ruin Me. Written with an obvious knowledge of – and love for – the horror genre by DeFrancis and his co-scribe Trysta A. Bissett, the film enjoys throwing out obscure horror references whilst openly embracing numerous clichés and tropes before turning them around or halting them mid-flow with an abrupt change of course.
So even when you think you’ve got a handle on exactly what’s going on, Ruin Me never lets you become absolutely certain – you’ll second-guess yourself more in a single 10-minute stretch of Alex’s nightmare than you will in the entirety of most modern mainstream thrillers. As Alex, Dwyer delivers a strong performance – moving from her initial glee at being really damned good at figuring out puzzles (much to the anger of Slasher Sleepout veteran Pitch) to an emotionally overwhelmed and bewildered victim. Her history with drugs is made a relevant point, so there’s always the underlying question of whether we can truly trust anything being delivered to us from Alex’s viewpoint – another layer of obscurity that really can’t be broken through until the ending.
And while the ending wraps things up nicely, it isn’t a million miles out from what most will expect from an audience-teasing game of Ruin Me’s nature – yet that uncomfortable through-line of doubt does pay off by adding darker elements to a denouement that’s relatively disappointing in its narrow ramifications.
If you enjoy this kind of torturous mystery, and the feeling of being as logically lost as our protagonists while out in those woods, you’ll get a major kick out of Ruin Me. It’s a twisty, winding road of scuppered expectations and surprising revelations that will taunt you right up until the last moments (even if those final revelations aren’t quite the slam dunk you’d hope they would be).
Hell, even the film’s most irksome performance actually winds up being a very good one – the subtly disingenuous line delivery being a core facet of the character when all is said and done.
This is good stuff, and marks first-time feature director Preston DeFrancis as one to watch out for.
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Film
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