Director Jeff Wadlow’s Truth or Dare is, overwhelmingly, a silly horror flick that’s unconcerned with its silliness.
Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis don’t have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we’re never allowed to enjoy the characters’ misdeeds.
One wishes it had spared us the remedial theorizing on media culture and artistic representation and license and less apologetically acted the part of a straight-up horror film.
The film invokes the genuine creepiness of 1990s psychological thrillers, but such nostalgia only goes so far.
The film is so laughably Freudian it could play as a parody of certain acclaimed horror film studies.