Wounds | Film Review

Hey Guys x

This a Netflix movie that had a mildly interesting plot, but what really made me want to watch it was that it had such a good cast. The kind of cast that you feel could make even the worst films good. So I thought, why not?

Will (Armie Hammer) is a bartender who finds a lost phone in his bar one night. However, finding the phone is just the beginning of the nightmare for him and everyone around him.

I hate that this film had so much potential, because it really did. But there's so much wrong with it that I don't even know where to start.

Well, let's start with the cast. As well as Armie Hammer, the film also features Dakota Johnson, Zazie Beets, Karl Glusman and Brad William Henke. This cast, coupled with the basic plot of the film, could have been so great because the plot is vague enough to go in a hundred different directions. And to be honest, it started with a lot of promise.

However, it quickly went downhill once Hammer's character found the phone. Which isn't great as this is where the film is supposed to begin.

There are no good characters in this film. And by 'good', I mean any with any personality or character in themselves whatsoever.
There's a scene where one character tells another that he's 'not a person, just a body', and I think that's a really accurate description of these characters. They float around, saying what they're supposed to say without actually living. Their lines give them no personality, and by the end of the film you know virtually the same about them as you did before even pressing play in the first place. No one has a prominent personality.

I'd actually be really interested to know what the thought process was behind the film in the first place. I know that it is based on a novella by Nathan Ballingrud called 'The Visible Filth', and I kind of feel like being a book is the correct format for this story. It felt like there was too much happening, and it makes sense that having a 90 minute film wasn't long enough to get in personalities for the characters in the midst of the madness that was going on. I saw someone say that it might work better as a TV series and that's an idea that I agree with. There wasn't enough time for everything, and so it feels like it gave nothing.

The ending was weird and ridiculous, and the problem with it is that it's the kind of ending that makes people want to go online and type 'Wounds Ending Explained', but the film does such a bad job with these characters that the audience actually doesn't care about the ending explanation in the first place.

Even thinking back on it now, I still have no idea what was going on from the beginning of the film to the end.

Overall, I can't recommend this film because if someone recommended it to me I would be so angry with them! But maybe there's things about it that went over my head? I don't know, and I'm not in a hurry to find out.

4/10 (which is being generous, based on the acting and the fact that it was probably based on a really good idea, which got lost in the editing of the movie)

Lou