To Your Last Death, 2019
Miriam (Dani Lennon) is one of several children of a sadistic weapons manufacturer named Cyrus DeKalb (Ray Wise). When Cyrus calls his children together, things go horribly wrong and Miriam finds herself in the hospital suspected of serious violence. A mysterious figure, known only as the Gamemaster (Morena Baccarin), appears to Miriam, she offers her the chance to go back in time to save her family. Miriam agrees, but she does not realize that the creatures watching her life are more interested in entertainment than justice.
There are some interesting ideas in this one. I tend to enjoy time travel films, and I like the idea of the time travel being controlled by characters outside of the central narrative. There's also a lot of potential in the idea that the objective of the beings controlling the time travel just want as much blood and guts as possible.
However. The execution here leaves a lot to be desired.
First and foremost, the look of the animation has a lot of problems. All of the female characters look like they were traced from ads for blow-up dolls, complete with open O-mouths of surprise every time someone says . . . well, almost anything. It literally looks like someone drew porn-y naked women, the painted clothing over them. Every female character has the same build. The animation is not smooth, and it mostly makes me think of cheap morning cartoons (not in a good way). Some of the design choices are strange, such as blood spatter that looks more like one of the characters has a red colored beard.
The story itself really flounders, and especially the longer the film goes on. None of the characters are particularly interesting, including the villainous Cyrus. Cyrus hates his children and decides to kill them all with elaborate traps. But the traps feel like something a child would come up with after an older child described the movie
Saw to them. In one part, a man must answer elementary level math questions to avoid being choked by a machine . . . designed to choke someone getting questions wrong on an iPad? The film seems to aim for dark comedy, but the humor skews juvenile which means that it contrasts negatively with the darker moments, like Miriam's sister talking about being in a sexually violent marriage which she copes with via drugs and cutting herself. Ha ha?
There were a few moments of bleak humor that did make me smile, but they were too few and far between. Part of the problem is that the characters are not particularly likable. Cyrus is over-the-top horrible, but his kids are pretty awful in their own right. The less said about the evil henchmen (one of whom comes complete with an accent so thick you might think he came over from a very bleak iteration of Rocky and Bullwinkle), the better. And the time-travel gimmick begins to backfire a bit in the second half, as the mysterious beings begin to reset the timeline each time it resolves in a way that isn't thrilling enough. It becomes hard to care about what is happening on screen because it becomes pretty likely that the timeline will just reset.
Some fun ideas, but a very lackluster execution.
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