DVD Review: Hurt
Hurt (2009)
Studio: Monterey Video
Release Date: November 10, 2009
Directed By: Barbara Stepansky
Cast: Johanna Braddy, Sofia Vassilieva, Melora Walters, William Mapother & Jackson Rathbone.
Review By: Annie Riordan
Following the death of the family patriarch, the Coltrane family finds themselves in financial dire straits, unable to continue the affluent lifestyle they’ve become used to. Instead, they are forced to seek shelter with eccentric Uncle Darryl, a taciturn man who lives in a squalid shack in the middle of the Arizona desert. Mom Helen and son Conrad seem more or less willing to accept their new lives, but daughter Lenore is less than thrilled. Her tepid enthusiasm is further soured by the arrival of foster child Sarah, whom Helen and her late husband had agreed to sponsor before his death.
Sarah, the pouty-faced image of angelic innocence, moves in with the fractured family, which soon begins to fracture even further. First, Lenore’s pet duckling has its little neck wrung. Then Lenore catches Uncle Darryl creepily sitting in her mom’s bedroom, watching her sleep. When Conrad’s slutty girlfriend goes missing after the couple are caught mid-coitus in the backseat of Darryl’s classic car, brother and sister begin to suspect their Uncle. Has Darryl’s unrequited love for Helen finally driven him over the edge of his already shaky sanity? Or is it sweet little Sarah, seeking revenge for a deep, dark family secret?
Of course it’s Sarah. The movie never once tries to convince you otherwise which puts a bit of a damper on the suspense. But what Hurt lacks in a shocking climax it somewhat makes up for in a slow boil of dangerous, repressed emotions. Unfortunately, those emotions are never really allowed to erupt fully, content to remain at an even simmer.
It’s also a tad difficult to find anyone to root for in this tight little thriller. Sarah is a sociopath, Lenore is a spoiled brat, Helen is a wimp, Darryl is mega creepy and the guy who plays Conrad was in Twilight. (Yeah, I said it.) It’s hard to identify with such a screwed up cast of characters, so you’re pretty much reduced to simply watching the story unfold like an outdated roadmap, where dirt roads dead end at Stupidity Gully and every single character makes that wrong turn, sometimes more than once.
The ending is a foregone conclusion, and waiting for it to arrive takes perhaps a tad longer than it should. Everyone turns in decent performances, but the characters are never allowed to evolve. Even the character of Sarah is frustratingly one dimensional; where she should have gone from deceptively innocent sweetheart to psycho bitch from Hell, she instead starts out as a pouty weirdo and stays that way, turning slightly weepy and indignant at the film’s climax, where balls-out fury and homicidal rage would have been preferable.
Decent enough, but nowhere near as tense and satisfying as it could have been.
Brutal As Hell Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5
