I watched Wind Chill. I had thoughts while I watched it, and here they are:
This is a supernatural horror movie, blah blah, whatever. The main thing I took away here was that I just did not care for the protagonists. Not at all. They were not people I wanted to spend time with.
The story begins when the one woman and the one man meet up to share a car on a trip or something. They bicker a strange amount for two people who ostensibly just met to share this car. I thought that they were supposed to be some former friends who had bad blood between them or something, but nope. That’s just how they are. And it turns out that the man is also basically a stalker. My main feeling while watching was that I didn’t want to be watching them. That can’t be the intended effect.
There’s a frequently occuring trope in horror movies, especially the slasher movies, to have the protagonists be unlikeable jerks so that we are all happy to see them all get murdered. I don’t approve of that line of thought either, though at least I understand their reasoning. They are thinking the point of those films is that thrill of seeing people get slaughtered and if they are unlikeable it is all the better. That is probably true for a large portion of the audience. It isn’t for me, though. What I like about such films is seeing characters I like, or at least am interest in watching, as they try to get through the bad situations. I want to be happy when they succeed and saddened when they fail.
But that’s slasher movies anyway. This isn’t one of those. This is a movie about two people in a car and I don’t like those people and it takes way too long to get to the supernatural stuff. This is sharing a ride with two annoying strangers and it takes to long to get where I’m going.
I admit, the story does try to redeem the characters, have them grow as people and maybe get better, but it all happened long after I cared if they got better. By the time the stuff I wanted started happening, I did not care about how these two reacted to it.
Anyway, that’s it.