On strictly technical merits, this movie is just fine. Not a masterpiece, but there are better movies with worse directing, cinematography, and editing, so it functions well enough in that sense.
Unfortunately, it suffered from some pretty bad acting, though half the time, I couldn't tell how much of it was a flaw in the actors or a flaw in the writing, specifically the dialogue. The first half of the movie was plagued with terrible dialogue, weird acting choices, and, frankly, nonsensical behavior. The writer/director, Woods, makes the fatal mistake of being too eager to just move the plot along, to the point that it seemed that not a single one of the characters had even the slightest bit of situational awareness. Oddities occur, they do a double-take and move on. Someone says something strange, they do a double-take and move on. The situation seems off, they do a half-take and move on. And you didn't get much of a sense that any of these people even *liked* each other, let alone wanted to spend time with each other. Their interactions ranged from uncomfortable to a sense of sincere sublimated hatred. They seem to take any chance they can get to go off on their own little journeys, either physically or mentally, and seem to be completely unaware that their companions are actual people with personalities. And they work as quickly as possible to drop any potential issues that have been raised. This problem was most prevalent in the first half of the movie; the reason the second half was marginally better was simply because the plot itself started narrowing down their chances to behave irrationally. Not really much redemption there.
Their inexplicable behavior -- especially McKenzie who appears to be a borderline sociopath, sending her friends ahead to in a situation she knew was dangerous just to test it out, tying in to the fact that she knew it was dangerous but wouldn't tell anyone, followed by the fact that she knew her brother was in danger and knew what was happening but made no attempt to walk 5 feet and show him where she was -- ties into the incoherence of the underlying mythology. If you don't want to show all your cards, fine. But show at least a couple of them. The names, including the one the title derived from, seemed to have been invented sheerly because they "sound" interesting. None of it was actually given any foundation. The one -- and I do mean *one* -- concession to backstory was some vague story about what *might* be responsible (avoiding spoilers here), which took approximately 20 seconds of screentime. The rest was just some talk about what people do with the situation now. It's never explained how they derived their survival tactics and tools (why does the one phone work? how does what appears to be tomato soup work when drunk? why does said soup seem to randomly fail (it does so at least twice)? what's the deal with the guest book? how, for that matter, did the character take a half-second glance to know exactly what it was? and, ranging further afield, how does Ms. Temporary Final Girl escape the enemy in her penultimate fight? why was the one girl so insanely impressed by the other girl's ability to gently lower an axe and somehow defeat a lock? why did the brother seem almost upset that he was expected to care about his missing sister? and...I could go on for pages here. Let's just say the backstory and characterizations were criminally neglected.
It was a cool enough concept, which is why I watched in the first place. But I get the feeling that the director/writer didn't know how to build an actual coherent story. The dialogue was something I could have written the entirety of in a single evening and not been remotely taxed to be clever or naturalistic. The concept deserved more conscientious world-building, and more effort in the dialogue writing from Woods.
I'm giving this a 5 because, as noted at the top, it was technically fine, and the monsters, while not particularly scary, were interesting enough due to the basic concept. (The movie relies almost entirely on some form of jump scare. I'm not one of those horror fans who whine about jump-scares in themselves. Jump-scares work, else movie-makers wouldn't keep using them. So they're fine...if you don't rely almost entirely on them. Offer some alternate paths to conveying horror. I mean, the movie even messed up the "creepy roadside building" -- no matter how repelled the characters act or how much they talk about it being creepy, that was simply not a creepy building. It was a rather nice edifice built from stone and mortar. Place like that can fetch a pretty penny in most places.)
