Horror Movie Review: The Eve (2015)

Directed by Ritchie Steven Filippi and written by Evan Bass (who also acts in the movie), The Eve sees two couples heading to Martha’s Vineyard to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

Although it actually opens at a different place in a different time. One where the New Year’s countdown plays on the TV in a house of death. A unknown man is dead in a chair with a knife in his stomach. Nearby is a young girl who appears almost catatonic. The sounds of Auld Lang Syne is heard just to hammer the New Year’s theme home. Something that is appreciated for someone wanting a proper New Year’s Eve themed horror!

Cut to some time later/somewhere else and we have Scott (Al Thompson), Jenn (Maria DiDomenico), Harrison (Evan Bass) and Lacey (Miranda Noelle Wilson). Scott, Jenn and Harrison are old college friends whereas Lacey is the newcomer and the girlfriend of Harrison.

Their trip to a nice looking house in the Vineyard is an opportunity for the group to get to know Lacey. While also papering over the cracks in all their individual relationships.

There are some deep-seeded issues between the group. Harrison is bitter that Scott lost all his money on a bad business deal and doesn’t seem to care. Whereas Scott and Jenn previously dated and Lacey has intimacy issues, something she attributes to abuse from her father as a child.

The Eve spends a lot of time setting up the characters and delivering motivations for why anyone of them could snap. When an unknown assailant kills one of the group, everyone comes under suspicion and we get a ‘whodunit’ kind of thriller.

I say kind of because for all its attempts to subvert your predictions, it’s actually very predictable. I can’t see many people struggling to pick out the killer and their motivations as to why.

It’s not as suspenseful as it could have been (a bigger cast would have helped that) and at times, is pretty boring. That fault must lie at the feet of the writing which spends far too much time with characters that just aren’t that interesting. To make matters worse, a couple are wholly unlikable too. It’s not the fault of the actors as no-one does a horrible job, it’s the script.

By the finale is reached, it’s hard to care about anything that happens to the surviving cast. Instead you’ll find yourself hoping that it just hurries up so it can end.

Not a terrible movie by any stretch and it does nail the ‘New Year’s Eve’ theme well. It’s just a standard murder mystery that runs out of steam early and never picks back up again.