Fear The Night (2023)

Fear The Night (2023) is an action thriller starring Maggie Q.

An almost enjoyable film, but by no means essential. At least not for me! I’m well aware that this film is pretty much hated, ignored, and dismissed as just another piece of Netflix rubbish. And for good reason: it’s pretty distressing, and let’s face it, releasing a film of this “quality” in 2024 is just lunacy! When you see YouTube channels like Omeleto, you think that some amateur short films are at least a hundred times better in terms of rhythm and narration.

I should point out that the French version is just catastrophic. This time, the excellent dubbers were absent because they must not have wanted to work on it. And that spoils the fun of the film doubly (if not more!).

So it’s good to see Maggie Q again, an actress I like but don’t know too well. But here she plays Tess, a former soldier (too badass, as she likes to point out with her constant condescension towards others) who is preparing to celebrate her younger sister’s hen party in the company of their elder sister and her childhood friends, with whom she has little in common. The chosen location? A house belonging to their parents, obviously very isolated and, of course, with no network whatsoever (apart from a window on the upper floor), and, to top it all off, one that none of the owners or their descendants had set foot in for a long time. Then, what has to happen happens: a group of criminals comes to put an end to the festivities and threatens to kill all the female guests if they don’t let them in to get their hands on a mysterious target.

A run-of-the-mill feminist home invasion, ‘Fear the Night’ succeeds in making us instantly dislike all its characters, for whom no form of attachment is ever (or rarely) felt in the inevitable ordeal that awaits them (and that’s clearly a bit annoying in this kind of film!). Even the main heroine, although she’s my favorite character, gratuitously reasserts her superior super-soldier airs towards those close to her and strangers alike with undisguised disdain. What’s more, she has a tumultuous relationship with her unbearable older sister, as do almost all the other female protagonists (only the bride-to-be seems to have more than one neuron at her disposal), who are treated like a bunch of stereotypical jugheads whose superficiality is quickly replaced by the height of their stupidity in the face of the attackers. Tess even has to explain to them that surviving is a better solution than dying! Yes, it’s come to that!

Of course, as the antagonistic camp, the male characters will be treated as a one-sided evil, calling for no nuance in the venal-perversive-idiot combo that serves as the portrait to define them all. Special mention should be made of the serendipity of placing them in the path of the victims and the unbeatable stupidity of acting on the night when, as luck would have it, there’s someone in the target house! Yes, because otherwise it’s empty ALL the time! Didn’t any of them think to check the house before taking action? The phrase ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’ comes up at least twice. And we have a fine example of this in this film.

A feature-length film interspersed with the most artificial hour-counting possible, apart from not complicating the editor’s life too much, the process serves absolutely no purpose! So… this Neil LaBute film never has anything remotely innovative to contribute to this type of storytelling, content only to arouse the instincts of its female soldier (and those of his actress Maggie Q in the action) for a few unremarkable adventures, just good for filling a meagre quota of uninspired and predictable executions. Even the final battle is appallingly flat, unfortunately.

I read this sarcastic comment: ‘It’s quite simple, everyone deserves to die in this “Fear the Night”, including Neil LaBute for writing and directing it.’ So it’s better to really fear the night than hope for the slightest thrill from ‘Fear the Night’, which is forgettable from start to finish and which might have been better off focusing on the consequences of its eventful night for its heroines (as the epilogue hints at), as there might have been a slightly more relevant angle to explore rather than concentrating on yet another variation on the insipid home invasion. And with such ridiculous characters, I’m not sure it would have been much more exciting!

I admit that I still had an entertaining time, but that’s because I’ve seen much worse than this. But it’s not a film I’d recommend. My conclusion and advice would still be to suggest that you run away!