Reviews
‘This Tempting Madness’ Review: Stylish Psychological Thriller Nearly Collapses Under Its Twists
This Tempting Madness, the new thriller from director and co-writer Jennifer E. Montgomery, opens with a title card that ties it to a true story and insists that while names have been changed, the “strangest parts” are preserved. It’s an enticing opening, and for a while at least, it bears fruit.
Starring Simone Ashley as a young woman recovering from a horrible accident that may or may not involve an abusive spouse, the film establishes layers of intrigue early on, delicately folding them together with stylish visual and aural flourishes from Montgomery and the production team. It’s familiar to any seasoned viewer of psychological thrillers, and amnesia thrillers in particular, but it’s clicking…mostly.
Thanks to a solid lead performance, some compelling hooks in the script, and capable direction, This Tempting Madness manages to hold itself together as a solid little thriller, even if a third act that’s too twisty for its own good almost derails the whole thing.
Ashley is Mia, whose opening moments in the film show us her plunge from a high balcony, down through an atrium, and into a safety net that just barely saves her from death. In the hospital, with her jaw wired shut and her leg broken in several places, Mia finds her memories are horribly fragmented, and her lack of information about what happened to her isn’t helped by her protective brother Ajay (Suraj Sharma), who insists that she’ll know more when she’s well. Soon, portions of the truth come out. Mia’s husband, the volatile Jake (Austin Stowell), is in jail for attempting to murder her, but Mia doesn’t remember that, so what really happened? Is Jake a monster? Is Ajay manipulating her? Or is Mia herself forgetting the person she was before the fall?
While the film settles into certain familiar rhythms of its subgenre, Montgomery, who co-wrote the script with Andrew Davis, also works hard to keep you guessing, and largely succeeds. It’s easy to buy Mia’s suspicion over what’s really happened, in part because her life feels so shattered, and in part because it really does seem like Ajay could be a pushy patriarch-in-training, just as it seems like Jake could be an unstable killer, even if he simply acted in the heat of the moment.
Flashbacks start to shade in details throughout the film’s first half, and they too pull Mia and the viewer in disparate directions. It legitimately feels like the truth, whatever it might be, is both nuanced and very frightening.
The problem comes in the third act, as revelations start to mount and Mia’s life grows even more chaotic amid her recovery. Her fragmented memory induces visions alongside memories, making it harder to understand what’s real, and when Ajay finally makes good on his promise to reveal what he’s been hiding, it shoots the film off in yet another strange direction that, while promising, doesn’t really resolve into anything satisfying in the climax.
There’s a moment where the film seems like it’s going to swerve into something truly bonkers, and while that moment is thrilling, its ending is far too conventional to make good on what it sets up. Instead of an emotional resolution that brings all of these ideas together, we’re left with a more straightforward ending that brushes over the thornier, more intriguing details of the story.
But This Tempting Madness makes up for its narrative deficiencies with a focus on style and craft that reminds us what mid-budget thrillers can do in the hands of the right artists. Montgomery, with the help of Davis as her cinematographer, makes her feature directorial debut into a showcase of visual dynamism, whether she’s tracking Mia along a creepy hospital hallway or making her orange dress in a flashback sequence flow into gorgeous abstraction, until Mia might be flying just as easily as she’s falling. Editor Kiran Pallegadda also turns in solid work, working with Montgomery to cut together Mia’s present experiences with flashbacks and visions until it all blends into one effective, nerve-jangling maelstrom.
The cast also shows up with a clear understanding of the assignment. Led by Ashley, who proves her versatility in a film that demands not just swerving between mental states but spending part of the story unable to talk, This Tempting Madness marshalls a strong ensemble that imbues every character with some degree of emotional substance. The whole cast rises to the twisty melodrama of it all, but the real standout is the reliably compelling Zenobia Shroff as Mia’s mother, Lakshmi, who injects soulful, patient warmth into a very dark story.
There is, it should be clear by now, a lot to like about This Tempting Madness. In the end, the film is simply trying to carry too much, and starts to cave under the weight of its many twists, but the foundation is solid, and structural issues aside, it’s still mostly left standing.
This Tempting Madness arrives June 12 in theaters and VOD.
Writer/director Izabel Pakzad built her feature directorial debut, Find Your Friends, from her own experience, an ominous car chase on a desert road late one night in the middle of a girls’ trip. That frightening pursuit, the sense of being cornered in a world with a baseline hostility to women, is the seed from which a compelling thriller grows.
But it’s not the whole story.
Starting with her own experiences might have been Pazkad’s catalyst, but Find Your Friends works because it’s willing to not just interrogate these threats, but to allow its characters to exist in a way that makes them far from perfect horror movie victims when those threats arrive. Intense, confrontational, and relentless, this is a film that begins as a psychological unraveling, then descends into revenge movie madness, all with a style perfect for the Euphoria generation.
Amber (Helena Howard) just went through a difficult breakup, and she’s looking forward to cutting loose during a trip out to the desert with her friends Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zion Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry), and Maddy (Sophia Ali). Her friends all think that what Amber needs is some drinks, drugs, and fun rebound sex, but Amber’s not so sure, particularly after her first attempt to hook up with a guy ends in the kind of casual sexual assault that’s easy for anyone who didn’t witness it to brush off.
Still, when the ladies make it out to Joshua Tree for their getaway, everyone’s in high spirits, and Amber’s hoping to put the past behind her and get lost in music and mood-altering substances. But the past won’t fade quite so easily, and the quintet of friends is about to find out that the present is even more frightening.
Structurally, this is a classic plot-driven thriller in which the decisions of the characters and their reactions to adversity inform who they are. We meet Amber and her friends mid-party, and aside from a couple of quiet moments, the party basically never ends, whether the girls are taking Molly at a desert concert or doing mushrooms in the wilderness. Along the way, we come to understand that, with adult responsibilities looming in their lives, these young women are all afraid of drifting apart, and they hope that a maelstrom of experience will bond them in such a way that they’ll reunite for a girls’ trip everywhere.
They’re trying to cling, often unhealthily, to a world in which they can hold each other up, and no one seems to need that more than Amber. Some characters don’t get as much detail brushed in as others – it’s really Amber’s movie despite its ensemble tendencies – but Howard, Thorne, and Moreno in particular imbue the film with emotional weight and palpable tension.
That tension comes from a few different places, whether it’s Amber trying to hold her friends responsible for what she considers abandonment at a key moment or Lavinia trying to wring every last drop of fun from the trip at all costs, but it’s most evident in the way the girls engage with their environment. If you’ve ever visited any kind of major party destination for twentysomethings, you’ve met these women. I bumped into an almost identical group recently at a resort in San Juan, and I’m sure I’m not alone in my sense of recognition.
These women are loud, energetic, intoxicated, and fiercely devoted both to each other and to their shared goal of shutting out the wider world in favor of an experience they curate together. While their behavior might be jarring at first, especially if you’re an old homebody like me, you soon realize that it’s the whole point of the dramatic tension Pakzad has set out to establish.
These characters need to be loud, profane, sometimes even self-centered and annoying, because Find Your Friends is a movie that dares you to dislike them. Why? Because Pazkad is interested not just in the slowly unfolding revenge narrative in the film, or in the way Amber’s psyche fractures under the weight of increasingly isolating experiences, but in forcing her audience to confront their own biases. In the eyes of a misogynistic viewer, these women seem to be doing a textbook version of “asking for it” or “being a tease.” They drink, they twerk, they speak frankly and openly about their sexual experiences, and they’re not shy about what they want when it comes to men.
Pakzad places all of this deliberately in our faces so that, when the violence and confusion start to kick in, we’re forced to consider our own internalized misogyny and judgment of women like these. If you’ve ever chastised a horror movie character for making a bad decision, Find Your Friends wants to throw that judgment back in your face. It is a wonderfully thorny exploration of the film’s themes, and it creates a thread of piano wire-tight tension that builds to one of the year’s most unforgettable horror crescendos.
The film’s thematic oomph and the sheer energy of its pacing, helped along by editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia and cinematographer Tim Curtin, is strong enough to mask some of its minor flaws. It could stand a bit more nuance, some tighter plotting, perhaps a bit quieter to let its ideas settle into place around the parties and the mayhem, but the film is so immediate and sensuous in its presentation, helped along by a pulsing soundtrack, that these things barely have time to take root in your mind.
This is a dreamy, feral little movie with a taste for blood, and I hope it finds the audience it deserves.
Find Your Friends arrives June 12 on Shudder.
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