Sick Review: Kevin Williamson’s Return to the Slasher Is Shot Through with Covid Anxities

Throughout, director John Hyams brings kinetic heat to Sick’s slasher trappings.

Sick
Photo: Toronto International Film Festival

With Wes Craven’s Scream, screenwriter Kevin Williamson perfected the art of the cold open, and Sick makes a game and clever attempt at updating it for the age of Covid. John Hyams’s film, co-written by Williamson and Katelyn Crabb, opens on a young man during the early days of the pandemic as he tries in vain to get toilet paper in a stock-deficient store. Soon he’s on the receiving end of a series of mysterious, initially playful texts from an unknown source, which become increasingly more threatening when he returns home, where the sender emerges from the shadows to mercilessly dispatch him.

Sick then shifts focus to Miri (Bethlehem Million) and Parker (Gideon Adlon), who drive out to the vacant rural mansion that Parker’s family owns in order to quarantine together. Once there, they kill time playing drinking games while watching the news, taking a shot at each mention of Anthony Fauci’s name. Their hangout is interrupted by Parker’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, DJ (Dylan Sprayberry), whose nonchalance over Covid safety protocols irks the more conscientious Miri. But the more unwelcome intrusion comes when the mystery killer from the opening sequence appears on the scene, gradually making his presence unnervingly apparent.

The beats of the subsequent home invasion are fairly routine, but Hyams’s direction gives them a refreshing jolt of energy. Perhaps unsurprising for a filmmaker who proved his genre bona fides through two mesmerizingly gonzo Universal Soldier sequels and the stripped-down survival thriller Alone, Hyams brings kinetic heat to Sick’s slasher trappings. Throughout, the film’s characters impressively hold their own when forced to defend their lives, with Hyams catching every incident of bone-crunching mayhem as if he were shooting a martial arts film.

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Throughout, Williamson solidifies Miri and Parker as another in his pantheon of strong female characters, as they intelligently and fiercely size up the evolving situation. Of course, like the Scream series, the question of who’s behind the mask and what’s motivating his murderous game remains the film’s paramount mystery. When the irreverent reveal arrives, Sick charges full-bore into what could only be called Covid-sploitation, and this initially provocative and urgent twist comes to feel like a cheap punchline given its lack of follow-through.

In the end, Sick mostly elects to tie up narrative ends in almost perfunctory fashion. The film’s denouement also betrays the fact that Williamson can at times seem woefully out of touch when it comes to writing for the Gen-Z market; while he’s known for his acerbic self-awareness, he misses some opportunities to comment on his characters’ über-privileged and social media-savvy existences. Ultimately, though, Williamson’s collaboration with Hyams still turns out to be a largely revitalizing and fruitful endeavour. With Wes Craven no longer around, the screenwriter has found a director who can apply a new kind of dynamic visual energy to his still-firm grip on the rulebook of what makes slasher films truly slay.

Score: 
 Cast: Jane Adams, Marc Menchaca, Dylan Sprayberry, Gideon Adlon, Charla Bocchicchio, Bethlehem Million, Jihae Song, Duane Stephens, Logan Murphy, Kimberlee Kraczek  Director: John Hyams  Screenwriter: Kevin Williamson, Katelyn Crabb  Running Time: 83 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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