‘Dolly’ Review: Dude, Where’s My Face?

A colossal killer in a mask, unsuspecting victims, a house located so deep in the woods that no one can hear you scream. Given its preponderance of clichés, there’s almost no way to describe Rod Blackhurst’s Dolly, which is based on the filmmaker’s 2022 short film “Babygirl,” and make it sound particularly enticing. Unless you have beef with Seann William Scott, in which case you’ll dig what that colossal killer in a mask does to his face.

Justin Derry’s grainy 16mm cinematography certainly brings an appreciably tactile intensity to the film, which begins with Macy (Fabianne Therese) and her boyfriend, Chase (Scott), heading off to a romantic hike in the woods after dropping his daughter off at her aunt’s house. Chase means to propose to Macy, but after the pair stumbles upon creepy dolls arranged on the ground and attached to trees, the viewer has absolutely zero expectation that Chase is ever going to get down on one knee—or, at least, not in the way that he expected to.

Not long after Chase’s face has a meet-ugly with a shovel wielded by Dolly, a hulking figure in a porcelain doll mask played by Max the Impaler, Macy is knocked out and wakes up wearing a child’s gown inside a strange house. It’s there that she’s forced to play the part of Dolly’s new daughter, and Blackhurst’s film carries a perverse kick as it starts to riff on the family dinner from Tobe Hooper’s 1974 grindhouse classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

There’s sly comedy to Dolly’s babying of Macy. As Macy resists the diaper and pacifier foisted upon her, the interactions between captive and captor come to resemble that of a frustrated mother and an unruly child. But the film’s inventiveness more or less ends the moment Macy closes her mouth to a spoonful of revolting gruel. One senses that Blackhurst knows that Dolly is undernourished, but his attempts to jazz it up by splitting it into transparently titled chapters (“Fight,” “Mother,” and so on) only calls further attention to that dearth of imagination.

In a notable moment, Macy is glimpsed falling backward toward the ground against a swirl of impressionistic colors. Such a flourish might suggest a distinct artistic voice in another context—like, say, one of Anna Biller’s self-consciously campy, horror-kissed melodramas—but in something as derivative as Dolly, it’s as ill-fitting as when Macy wakes up in her tormentor’s house, her adult-sized limbs dangling down the sides of a child-sized crib.