Don't Move (2024): Wasted potential in this survival thriller

Don’t move. No, I don’t mean you. You can move all you want. I’m talking about the latest movie from Netflix. It has an interesting concept that could allow for a twist on the standard survival thriller movie. Unfortunately, it wastes the concept and ends up as a generic survival thriller.

Iris (Kelsey Asbille) is a grieving woman, having recently lost her son in a horrible accident. One day, she hikes to a place in the woods where a makeshift memorial has been created. There she meets a man (Finn Whitrock) who has also lost a loved one. Although he seems helpful, he has something more sinister in mind. Iris quickly finds herself stunned, bound and injected with a paralytic agent that will soon render her unable to move.

It's a great setup with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, Don’t Move never lives up to it. The addition of the paralytic agent should add a unique twist to the genre. I was expecting a movie where the protagonist is being chased and must continually outwit her attacker while her body is slowly shutting down. Instead, the paralytic takes full affect early on, and Iris must then depend on others to find and help her. The movie becomes a series of improbable events, with an antagonist whose motivation appears to be only to get to the next set piece.

I suppose this movie should be an exploration of grief and the human will to live. Iris is a woman that appears to have given up on life, and yet is fighting to stay alive. Don’t Move does little to explore this, though. Having Iris be a grieving mother adds little to the story. Her grief is only used as a cheap device to get you to care, and I found the brief flashbacks of her and her son to be cloying at best. As far as it affects the narrative, Iris could have been any random woman with no backstory, and nothing would change. There is potential for an interesting character arc that is completely wasted.

Perhaps the biggest sin of Don’t Move is that it fails to provide any tension. Iris’s inability to move or speak, combined with the isolation of the woods, should put you on edge. At the very least, you should be wondering how she will escape each situation (personally, I would have just curled into the fetal position and sobbed uncontrollably until the paralytic took affect). Instead, you’re left waiting to see if someone discovers Iris and can provide help. This makes the narrative feel like a series of disjointed events, and the pacing suffers from it.

I did enjoy the performance from Kelsey Asbille. It’s a tough role as she is immobile for most of the movie and must rely on her eyes to convey any emotion. Her ability to show a range of emotions, from fearful and vulnerable to strong and determined, with limited movement and dialogue is impressive. I would have liked a more thoughtful character arc for her, but the performance is solid.

Unfortunately, I did not find any of the other performances to be on her level. Whitrock isn’t bad, but as a serial killer, I did not find him the least bit menacing. That may be more a fault of the script, but I just wasn’t buying the character at all. Any hints at his backstory seemed hackneyed (he lost someone and that gave him the clarity to know that he now wants to kill people – sure, whatever). To me, it felt more like he bumbled his way through his kidnapping (and god-knows-what-else) plot, and he never appeared very threatening.

Visually, the movie looks fantastic. I loved the (mostly) outdoor setting and the use of natural sounds. There’s also a nice contrast between the wide-open space, and a character that is trapped in her own body. There’s some potential to weave that into the narrative more, but once again, it is wasted.

Don’t Move seems to promise a unique twist on a survival thriller that could avoid the standard tropes of the genre. Instead, its concept is wasted, used only to get the story started, and then provide the same old tropes. The protagonist may be unable to move, but there’s little here that you haven’t seen before. Personally, I found it boring, but I can see where others would enjoy this more than I did. I can’t recommend it, but if it sounds interesting to you, I say give it a shot.

Have you seen Don't Move? Are you planning to? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.