Wounds (Movie Review)

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

PLOT: When a bartender finds a forgotten phone in the bar, content on the phone gradually turns his life into a nightmare.

REVIEW: Writer/director Babak Anvari didn't want to make another horror film as a follow-up to his feature debut, 2016's very well received UNDER THE SHADOW. But after being shown author Nathan Ballingrud's novella The Visible Filth, he found himself drawn into making another horror movie, adapting The Visible Filth into WOUNDS… And after watching Anvari's second horror movie, I was left feeling that it might have been better if it hadn't been horror.

I don't know how Ballingrud's story plays out, but WOUNDS plays best when it's presenting itself as a low-key drama about the life of a New Orleans bartender, Armie Hammer as a character named Will. Will lives with his college student girlfriend Carrie (Dakota Johnson) and is jealous that she's always talking about a certain professor, but then again he probably wouldn't mind breaking up with her because he has a deep crush on one of the regulars at the bar, Zazie Beetz as Alicia. If only Alicia wasn't already taken by a guy Will considers to be a "little bitch". A whole lot of the movie focuses on Will's relationship issues, and I got the sense that Anvari was much more interested in the slice of life drama aspect of the film than he was in the horror element. There's much drama going on here, but little bits of horror keep popping up to disrupt it.

That said, there are some effectively unnerving moments in the movie. Anvari isn't playing the jump scare game, when horror comes into the picture he's trying to get under the viewer's skin, show them something psychologically troubling, and maybe gross them out a little with the sight of cockroaches. Horror enters Will's life in a very simple way – after a fight breaks out in the bar, he finds that one of the patrons who left to avoid the trouble forgot their phone. Rather than just set the phone aside in "lost and found" and wait for the owner to return, Will figures out how to unlock the phone, and while overstepping boundaries he becomes the new target of an evil presence the owner and some friends unleashed through a ritual involving occult books on a "translation of Wounds".

Hammer carries almost the entire movie on his shoulders and does a fine job of bringing Will to life, even though he's not a very likeable character. He receives some strong support from Beetz, whose Alicia isn't just the object of desire caught between two men. She's her own person with depth, who makes questionable decisions and then tries to make up for it. Brad William Henke shows up in a memorable role as an out-of-control bar regular who gets quite a nasty wound on his face during a barroom brawl.

I'm not quite sure why Dakota Johnson is in this movie, though. Carrie has very little to do. Will suspects that she doesn't love him anymore, and I wouldn't doubt it. Her character has so little personality, I'm not sure there's much emotion going on inside her at all, and Johnson delivers many of her lines as if the character is sleepwalking through her life. When Carrie isn't acting so subdued that you wonder if she even has a pulse, the character is being put into an actual trance by the supernatural force lingering over her and Will. Casting Johnson in this role seems like a waste, and it's not clear why she would want to do it. I'm sure she's being offered better characters than this.

Johnson's best moment comes in my favorite scene in the film, when Will presents the idea of breaking up and then gets pissed when Carrie doesn't appear to be heartbroken by it. The fact that it's little dramatic dialogue scenes that stand out for me more than anything else about WOUNDS is indicative of how underwhelming the horror side of things is. There is imagery that will stick in my mind, but the horror just feels like a distraction half of the time, and when Anvari does let the horrific scenes go on in an attempt to stir up an unsettling atmosphere it mainly succeeds in being dull.

This comes off as being a horror movie that doesn't fully work because the director really wanted to make a relationship drama, and a relationship drama that doesn't fully work because the story keeps getting sidetracked into flashes of horror. Either way, it just doesn't work very well.

WOUNDS will be available to watch through the Hulu streaming service as of October 18th.