Taut 1993-set-and-styled home invasion thriller sees a pregnant lady chased around a dream home that soon becomes a nightmare.
★★★
In this American horror-thriller directed and written by David Charbonier and Justin Powell, known for their previous films The Boy Behind the Door and The Djinn. Alicia Sanz stars as Natalie Flores, a pregnant realtor haunted by the trauma of her American boyfriend’s fatal car crash who has retreated home to Barcelona. Determined to make a fresh start, she returns to the U.S. to resume work – only to find herself isolated at an open house that is rumoured to be cursed. Only one taciturn man (Raúl Castillo) attends – and he scowls at her that the house is more sinister than she realises. As the sun goes down, Natalie discovers her car will no longer start – but that’s just the beginning of her problems, as the power fails and she is pursued relentlessly by a mysterious attacker.
With a pregnant lady being chased around a house, and a car crash backstory, astute viewers will no doubt be reminded of New French Extremity flick Inside (2007). But Push has a very different aesthetic, with its cinematography, soundtrack, production design and even its opening credits all much more reminiscent of early-90s psychothrillers like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle or Single White Female. The logic seems to be that this kind of hide-and-seek plot only works if nobody has a mobile phone, so you need to set it in the early 90s – and if you’re doing that, you might as well follow through with the overall texture of the thing.
The story is simple, and occasionally rather silly – Natalie briefly tries to fashion some broken glass into a weapon, before giving up on that idea, while the killer simply picks up a big knife from the kitchen… c’mon Natalie, see how easy that was? But a film like this stands or falls on whether the sequences of running around, hiding, fighting, and running around again are shot, blocked and edited well enough to bring the terror. The good news is that Charbonier and Powell, together with cinematographer Daniel Katz (My Friend Dahmer, Come to Daddy) and editor Stephen Boyer (The Wrath of Becky) deliver the taut, nerve-jangling thrills the movie needs.
It’s not up there with the edgy artistry of Inside, but Push stands alongside Mike Flanagan’s Hush and John Hyam’s Sick in the world of modern punchy one-word-title home invasion thrillers. If you like to see a resilient woman repeatedly trying to close and lock doors before the advancing killer catches her – while he mysteriously refuses to ever break into a run – then this is certainly worth all 89 minutes of your time. As for the sudden shift in genre at the climax that takes it away from those movies and into something else entirely – that will have to wait for our spoiler review…
Push is available on Shudder from July 11. Trailer below…
Whitlock&Pope 