By Simon Thompson
Ryan Hendrick’s Mercy Falls is a slasher movie so generic and boilerplate that it feels like the cinematic equivalent of a ready salted crisps, still water, and a ham sandwich meal deal. The narrative centres around Rhona, a young woman who has been left her dad’s old highland cabin in his will. Because of a traumatic memory that Rhona has attached to the cabin she decides to bring along her group of friends to make the trip to take it over more bearable. While they are staying the night in a lodge before the trip however, they bump into a mysterious hitchhiker named Carla who in predictable fashion isn’t the orienteering good Samaritan she’s presenting herself to be (especially considering that she’s always in a perpetual state of trying not to break out into Jokeresque evil laughter after every line of dialogue).
The main issue that Mercy Falls has as a story is in its characterisation, the characters aren’t so much three-dimensional human beings as big fat bullseye targets and any horror fan well versed in the slasher sub-genre can figure out which ones will live and which ones will be killed off in about fifteen seconds flat. It also doesn’t help that Hendrick and Melia Grasska’s script is pretentious and clunky: rather than lean into the kind of violent and campy fun a good slasher movie brings to the table, Hendrick and Grasska instead provides us with tepid banter that makes Michael Owen and Jake Humphrey look like Cook and Moore by comparison, and scattered literary references which serve no purpose other than to show off to the audience to how intelligent the writers are.
I will give Hendrick credit where it is due however, the movie’s setting of the Scottish Highlands is rendered beautifully by his camera with the picturesque quality of the trees and the mist alleviating the slog that this movie is to get through. Mercy Falls is a poorly acted and written, bog-standard outing with twists and turns that wouldn’t exactly trouble Colombo, which sadly isn’t even enjoyable in a so bad its good way.
Mercy Falls is available now on digital platforms.
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