The Owners (Horror Movie Review)

Last Updated on December 21, 2021

PLOT: A group of low-life friends stakes out a mansion belonging to an old couple. Hoping to access their secret basement safe and live the good life, they find out that the couple is crazier and more dangerous than anyone thought.

LOWDOWN: I may be the only soul on earth that doesn’t love DON’T BREATH, but THE OWNERS (WATCH IT HERE) owes a lot to the former film for better and worse. All you need to do is replace an old blind man with a cute old couple, and we follow a very similar path. THE OWNERS had a lot I liked and kept the old couple’s true nature close to the chest for most of the movie, creating the incredible tension that whooped my ass for a majority of the runtime. The issue is that we get some head-scratching issues and, as a dog hair in your beer, could have been easily avoided. But what the hell, if you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further? Drink ’em if you got ’em, and let’s dive into the good and bad of THE OWNERS.

The foursome has a real sense of angst, desperation, and chemistry with baddie Gaz (Jake Curran) being the group’s standout. The ringleader who is by far the one person willing to go “all the way,” I enjoyed the hell out his sinister performance and would argue that he kinda stole the first act. Maisie Williams plays the protagonist as the kind girlfriend who gets roped into a situation that goes bad fast. As, again, the only dude who’s never watched GAME OF THRONES, I’ve heard about Williams as an actress, and to nobody’s surprise, she nails the role of Mary and plays a great final girl. The evil and suspiciously considerate Dr. Huggins (the seventh Doctor, minus the TARDIS here), and his wife Ellen (McCoy and Tushingham) play the right amount of f*cking creepy. You know they’re wicked, but damn it if they are not wholly proper and polite!

What works is the tension and unraveling of these old folks turning the tables on the unsuspecting friends while hiding their ulterior motives. Director Julius Berg does great at keeping the location practical yet disturbing while the characters are in real peril. I was all about the first half of THE OWNERS and loved where it was going, but great acting and directing aside, there are some dumb sh*t decisions here that derail the middle section into an unintended drinking game.

As shown in the trailer, Mary and her friends get stuck in an English mansion, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out how the group doesn’t get the f*ck out? This movie has the Huggins clan as this “all imposing force,” but THE OWNERS is a semi-realistic tale, and NOBODY’S held against their will at gunpoint. So… a seventy-seven-year-old man is holding you, hostage, with his, what? Take a shot, folks. The second the “situation” becomes apparent, I would have clocked that old man so f*cking hard his dog would have hurt. This has the villans use physical force, which considering their age, is just ridiculous. There is a tense scene with a syringe, which makes sense, but having the Doc beat down a door or have Ellen use a whip to subdue, it all just seems too silly and deflates any real sense of danger. I don’t care how moody this gets; even a hundred-pound girl would overpower a lot of these “tough” situations.

It’s an odd oversight considering how tight the script is otherwise. How the tension and mystery unfolds is creative, and the Huggins (especially the fallen matriarch Ellen) plays the perfect wolves in sheep’s clothing type. In a great use of playing with perspective, Berg changes aspect ratio’s that tightens as the situation worsens. What a cool and unique way to mess with your audience, and it’s techniques like this that make THE OWNERS an entertaining movie when it’s not having me believe that the elderly are physically menacing!

GORE: This doesn’t hold back. We get a bloody gut stab, a sledgehammer to the face, and a few others that I’ll hold back on. I’m glad THE OWNERS didn’t shy away from the red stuff and wisely embraces it.

BOTTOM LINE: I was more annoyed than I should have been and disagree strongly with the WTF decisions made here, and how this movie used the antagonists. The first and last act saved this from being a complete sh*tshow, and left me with a decent feeling in my gut. I can’t say that THE OWNERS is a great movie, but it ain’t bad, which has me landing on it being a decent time that should have been a lot better — a movie dueling with itself on how clever it wants to be without entirely earning it.

The Owners

NOT GOOD

4