Don’t Move is effectively Netflix’s horror movie version of Crank, and it stars a familiar face of Yellowstone. It’s streaming now, so here’s a breakdown of what you should know.
Netflix has produced some of the best horror movies and TV shows of the past 10 years. Creep (and Creep 2) are among the best found-footage films ever made, The Ritual boasts one of the scariest movie monsters of all time, and The Haunting of Hill House is just one of Mike Flanagan’s masterpieces on the streaming service (with an all-time jump scare to boot).
This weekend, with Halloween fast approaching, you’ll probably spend more time than you’d like scrolling through the platform’s films in a desperate effort to find something to watch. Before you know it, the night will have slipped away before you’ve had the chance to press play.
Fear not, because Netflix has made it easy for you with Don’t Move, a new original horror flick produced by Sam Raimi. Let’s get into it.
What is Don’t Move about?
Don’t Move has a simple, terrifying premise: a lone woman hiking in the woods meets a stranger who injects her with a drug that will shut her body down… in 20 minutes.
Netflix’s logline reads: “A grieving woman hoping to find solace deep in an isolated forest encounters a stranger who injects her with a paralytic agent. As the agent gradually takes over her body, she must run, hide, and fight for her life before her entire nervous system shuts down.”
According to Brian Netto, who co-directed the film with Adam Schindler, it’s “a story of a woman who finds herself in a situation where she’s struggling, she’s at a low point.”
“All of a sudden, she finds herself dosed with a paralytic, and her body is going to slowly but surely shut down. Now she’s in a fight for her life.”
It’s almost an inverse of Crank, Jason Statham’s iconic action movie where his hitman has to keep his adrenaline levels high to prevent his heart from stopping.
Raimi, a horror maestro best known for the Evil Dead franchise (as well as the original Spider-Man movies), described the script as a “nonstop page-turner… it’s a moving experience, especially for a suspense film.”
“The script asked our actor to be still for so many minutes in the movie, and I was afraid. I was concerned that the audience would become restless, but the directors handled it so well, it becomes more and more suspenseful,” he added.
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Who’s in the Don’t Move cast?
Kelsey Asbille, who plays Monica Dutton in Yellowstone, is the lead of Don’t Move, starring alongside Finn Wittrock (American Horror Story), Moray Treadwell (The Witcher: Blood Origin), and Daniel Francis (Bridgerton).
The movie presented an extraordinary challenge for Asbille: if your character’s body is shutting down, and you can’t speak, how do you convey her emotions to the audience?
“I really had to depend heavily on [Netto and Schindler], especially when it came to the paralysis and what translates on-screen versus what doesn’t,” she explained.
“The script lays out the stages of paralysis, but there’s an emotional experience and internal struggle that you have to convey, and you are so limited physically. That was the challenge, and it was fun to figure it out together.”
Witrock praised Asbille’s ability to “communicate” her character’s struggle with so little. “Kelsey had this incredible challenge, which was like she had to express so much with hardly any ability to use her body, which is generally what we use to express ourselves,” he said.
Is Don’t Move worth watching?
Don’t Move doesn’t have a Rotten Tomatoes score, but it’s received mixed reviews so far.
The Guardian gave it a three-star review, arguing that while it “doesn’t quite stick the landing… there are enough heart-in-throat moments on the way there to separate this from most of the genre guff on Netflix.”
Variety praised Asbille’s performance, even noting that she strikes such a strong connection with the viewer that it would have been “fun to watch in a theater with a crowd, where people are inclined to shout at the screen.”
Collider said it has an “unsettling premise and solid performances, but lacks sufficient thrills… the horror elements are underwhelming, save for some shocking moments of violence.”
Make sure you check out our list of the scariest Netflix movies available to watch now, and we’ve also got details on Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2’s release date.
