Final Girl: Boring Vengeance

There’s a trope in horror movies: the final girl. The one left alive. Who confronts (and maybe defeats) the killer. The one left to tell the tale. And, sometimes, the first person to die in the sequel.

I’m all for upending tropes, which is why I checked out 2015’s Final Girl, now streaming on Netflix. The premise is simple: instead of ending the movie with the final girl, we’ll start there. Make the whole movie about the last ten minutes, when the tables are turned and the hunter becomes the hunted.

Final Girl starts off strong. We meet young Veronica orphaned and abandoned after the death of her parents. A young William takes her in and decides to train her. William is no ordinary man and Veronica is no ordinary child. She has special abilities William recognizes, and he decides to train her in martial arts and other ways of subduing and incapacitating people. A while back, William’s wife and daughter were murdered, and William is out for revenge. He knows there’s a pack of boys who hunt women for sport, and he wants to train Veronica into a killer before sending her after them.

So what went wrong?

While Final Girl’s premise may sound promising, it fails in a lot of the execution. Let’s start with the script. At only 84 minutes, Final Girl whizzes by, and not in a good way. Character development feels rushed, even for the small cast of a dozen. William’s motives are glossed over, Veronica’s decision to join this group is badly explained, and the four boys who do the hunting have all the character development of a hyena pack. The first thing this movie needs is about 20 more minutes spent on character development.

Shallow characters

The second thing it needs is heart. There’s no real emotions given off by any of the characters. Veronica (Abigail Breslin) I can forgive. She’s playing a part and can’t betray her own emotions. As William’s protégé, she’s grown up without any emotional attachments (except for the weird scene where she tried to seduce him, which was awkward and unnecessary). We’re never treated to the depths of William’s (Wes Bentley’s) pain. His wife and daughter die in a throwaway line in the first ten minutes.

As for the boys? The four interchangeable teenagers never rise up to the level of malicious evil their actions would require. They’re so interchangeable I can’t remember the names of their characters. The tall blond one is the ringleader. One carries a hatchet and fails at a Dead Martin impression every time he speaks. One carries a bat and loves his mother (a little too much, in another unnecessary scene). The last one is a bit nebbish, but has a girlfriend, whom remains blissfully unaware that her boyfriend kills women for sport.

Odd set choices

I get that it’s low-budget. I get there aren’t many places filming can take place. But I found the sets even lacking. “The woods” are as generic as they come, while the fifties-style diner where the boys hang out is just as inexplicable as the fact the pack all wear tuxedos when they hunt. (That’s not obvious and weird. Not at all.) First-time director Tyler Shields is principally a photographer, which shows in his lighting choices. Much of Final Girl takes place either in semi-darkness or under some weird spotlight, bathing the principal actors in light and giving the movie an unrealistic quality. It’s distracting and takes me out of the movie experience. While the lighting may be different, it makes Final Girl seem more like a stage play than a film.

Indie horror has been done better (Pontypool). Upending the final girl trope has also done better (Hostel 2). While Final Girl is ambitious, it drowns in a shallow pool, being too short and too one-dimensional to have much of an impact.

Final Girl tl;drs

Quick summary: There’s a pack of young boys who hunt women for sport. William recruits and trains Veronica to return the favor.

Too many writers? It took three writers to come up with an 84-page script, which feels like two writers too many.

Recommended if you like: Upending tropes, spotlights

Better than I expected? Abigail Breslin shines as the tough Veronica

Worse than I hoped? Man this movie is short. I’ve sat through longer episodes of The X-Files that gave its characters more depth.

Should it be rebooted? I don’t see the point. There’s other movies with this premise that deliver better.

Verdict: Too short and shallow to be a satisfying trope-killer.

Related Reading: Wiki article