Before he moved into the neon-lit worlds of blockbuster, kaiju smackdowns, Adam Wingard was the very model of an indie filmmaker. Not only was he a member of the mumblecore movement with films such as Autoerotic and A Horrible Way To Die striving for a starkly realistic feel, but he already cemented his horror credentials thanks to being heavily involved in both the V/H/S and ABCs Of Death anthology franchise. However, in 2011, his gradual shift toward the mainstream began with the vastly impressive You’re Next – a film that not only turned the slasher/survival on its head years before the likes of Ready Or Not, or Bodies Bodies Bodies showed up, but managed to perfectly balance that Indie unpredictability with a mainstream sense of fun that helped the film stand out in a very crowed marketplace. However, what really sets the film apart from its peers is the spectacular the movie approaches the final girl trope. Ready to see something new? Step right up folks, you’re next.
The wealthy Davidson clan are planning a family dinner at their vacation home in rural Missouri and while relations between some of the members are decidedly flinty, Erin, the girlfriend of Crispian Davidson is hoping that she makes a good impression. Before we know it, both we and Erin are meeting the various members of the family, from patriarch Paul and the noticeably delicate Aubrey, to eldest brother Drake and his wife Kelly. From their, we move to younger brother Felix and his sullen looking girlfriend, Zee, and bringing up the rear is the bubbly youngest, Aimee and her filmmaker boyfriend Tariq. However, it doesn’t take long to realise that there’s a few cracks in the Davidson foundations that’s mostly caused by the resentment Crispian feels for his dickish older brother and the fact that Aubrey is on a sizable amount of pills for her nerves, but Wrin manages to hold her own among the barely concealed snark before a random crossbow bolt changes the tone of the evening considerably.
It seems that a trio of mysterious, masked men have targeted the Davidsons for death and after strafing their dinner with lethal bolts, the group now realise that they’re under seige. Worse yet, these assailants have come prepared, setting up a rather nasty piano wire trap across the front door and wielding a bunch of formidable weapons – however, as the night goes on, it seems that the three bloodthirsty killers haven’t accounted for something rather important. You see, Erin has had something of a complex childhood that means while the Davidsons are freaking out like panicked chickens, the young Australian proves to have something of a formidable survival streak which starts to even the odds. As bodies soon start to hit the floor on both sides, we soon find out that Erin’s not the only one who has something extra going on…
While I’ll freely admit that in the time since You’re Next’s release, other filmmakers have managed to fuck around with the established slasher formula to a game changing degree, watching Wingard’s masterfully entertaining rug-puller felt like a grenade was going off in the cinema. Armed with an incredibly savvy script by Simon Barrett, Wingard attacks the sub-genre with gusto, swapping out the usual teen/young couple antics you’d find in The Strangers or something similar, and deftly flips everything on its head until nothing is what it seems. The setting of a big-ass house is fairly standard, but the fact that it’s an upper-class family being stalked shifts things onto their axis in a way that feels utterly fresh. Wingard’s indie experience serves him well as he sets up the various dynamics of the family without laying it on too thick and letting the various issues between the siblings bubble up naturally. However, when things fully kick off, there’s a tremendous amount of fun watching the pampered, privileged family suddenly have to start fighting for their lives while Sharni Vinson’s Erin suddenly turns into Batman with prep time.
But it’s the constantly shifting nature of the flick that makes it so exciting to experience for the first time. Not only does the “girlfriend” character suddenly snap into beast mode who proves to be supremely capable at stoving in a man’s head with a tenderising mallet and setting up impromptu booby traps with devastating efficiency. Similarly, as the film goes on, the way the film portrays the killers begins to alter too. After starting the film as typically mute murderers glaring at their victims from behind blank-faced animal masks, but once the power balance shifts, the murderers start to become more and more “human” as they realise that their task isn’t going to be the grisly cakewalk they though it was.
Finally, even the victims themselves change throughout the course of the night, with some finding some inner courage and other eventually being revealed as being less than virtuous and as a result, You’re Next manages to score some pretty healthy rewatch value as it plays slightly differently once you’re fully clued in and all the cards are in the table.
However, as consistently smart as You’re Next is, it also doesn’t forget to nail the basics too. Realising that a film as innovative as this would probably play to a bigger crowd if they drop a bit of the arthouse pretentiousness, Wingard and Barrett makes sure that they put in a healthy amount of populist razzmatazz too. For a start, they don’t shy away from some graphic deaths with crossbow bolts thudding into skulls and faces getting pulped under hammers. In fact, the movie even embraces the creative killing by finding a novel use for piano wire and a spectacular second function for a food blender that shows that even before he was getting Godzilla to suplex King Kong off the side of the pyramids, Wingard was more than willing to let his hair down.
However, that doesn’t mean that the director isn’t proud of his roots and his cast is laden either with horror royalty (hello Barbara Crampton) or his filmmaking peers taking various acting roles that sees such names as Larry Fessenden, A J. Bowen, Joe Swanberg and Ti West get stuck into the carnage. From here, Wingard would progress even further into populist fare with arguably his best film, The Guest, but none of this would have been possible without this flick flipping expectations and subverting conventions in a way that proved to be quite exhilarating to a jaded horror nut like me.
Is it perfect? The comically abrupt ending doesn’t quite land as well as you’d hope and in the years since a bunch of other movies have managed to capitalise on some of the themes and concepts that might make latecomers ultimately wonder what all the fuss is about. However, when it comes to giving some well-worn sub-genres a kick in the pants – or even a swift axe in the head – You’re Next manages to add a sense of brutal finality to that final girl trope that saw less defense and a hell of a lot more offence.
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