You're Next is directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett. It stars Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, Wendy Glenn, A.J. Bowen and Joe Swanberg. Music is by Mads Heldtberg and cinematography by Andrew Palermo.
The Davison family and partners meet up for a family reunion at a remote holiday home and quickly find that their inner issues are the least of their worries.
The splinter of horror that encompasses home invasion, that most terrifying of subject matters, has had enough filmic entries to actually fill a house! So when another one comes along with good hype and a promise of reinvigorating the formula, it's cause for horror film fans to start salivating.
You're Next doesn't reinvent anything, but it consistently and confidently keeps the formula well oiled and proves to be one of the better films of its type. The set up is standard, a big old country house in the woods, a whole bunch of likable and dislikable people, and of course some outside assailants about to unleash hell on everyone in the house. Refreshingly this is not a roll call of pretty teenagers being stalked and slashed, this is an assorted bunch, young and old, all shapes and sizes, and the family bickering that precedes the carnage is a smart move, because once family members start getting killed there's a genuine sense of grief and regret coursing through those yet to be sliced and diced.
It's nice to find that Wingard has great respect for his target audience, he's made a film for fans of the sub-genre and inserted a darkly comic streak that pays off royally. It's often very nudge nudge and wink winkery, but always in the right places. The director also proves to have a devilish eye for a murder scene, with some of the killings here high grade in blood, physicality and originality. Elsewhere the makers give us a great heroine, a truly resourceful gal that fights back with a ferocity that's both sexy and frightening, and while the revelation of why these events are happening is hardly original – or that the back story given for our heroine's skills is just silly – Wingard plonks it all together with such bloody verve it hardly matters.
Some less than good acting from a couple of the cast, and the overuse of shaky-cam stops it from going through the roof out into the genius stratosphere, but this is a cracker of a home invasion horror and well worth a night in with the lights off and the volume tuned up loud. 8/10
