Yes, this movie played in fun ways with genre-mixing -- horror, comedy, social commentary, etc -- and I guess it's fine to take issue with that. But I don't believe it ended with a "twist" at all, and I find it more than a little unsettling to see it interpreted as primarily a depiction of social anxiety and the inability to take a joke rather than as a dramatic exposure of the intensely corrosive and toxic nature of covert, disavowed aggression and hostility that so often predominates among purported friends.
To me, this was a story about a genuinely likable guy, trying to do some good in the world, who was subjected to a scary (horror-level) degree of gaslighting and cruelty by a bunch of sickos living in an an exaggerated, primitive, posh, adolescent time warp. Whatever confusion and distorted perception he showed at the end of the film -- and the act of violence he commits -- were entirely induced by a campaign (coordinated intentionally or not) to drive him mad.
To say, as star and writer Tom Stourton has in interviews, that he finds Archie a more sympathetic figure than Pete because Archie "owns" his upper-class heritage rather than trying, in however flawed a way, to reckon with it meaningfully like Pete... seems bizarre to me. Sure, Pete is struggling to figure out the implications of his privilege and the onus it puts on him to live responsibly in this unjust world. Sure, this is awkward and difficult. But his response is also the ONLY humane and decent reaction to being born into such privilege, even if it puts you in awkward situations in which it isn't obvious how to abide by an actual moral code while also knowing how to 'be yourself.' Authenticity and virtue are not synonymous in a world of injustice. Pete is flawed, but he is trying. Archie is an "authentic" POS. I'll take Pete, any day.
For all those reasons, I never stopped liking him or identifying with Pete and don't think he was 'revealed' by the last part of the movie to be a different person from the one we had been led to believe he was -- and certainly not that he turned out to be paranoid, deluded, selfish, or a narcissistic jerk. I was genuinely surprised and disappointed to see the two 'Toms' who wrote it -- including Stourton, the star -- semi-endorse this anti-Pete reading of the film, as if he was caught in some kind of self-imposed hell-hole of his own making, rather than as an imperfect but sincere and well-meaning guy doing his best to navigate an environment in which, for whatever mysterious reasons, his companions were behaving monstrously and making him the scapegoat and target of their sustained, covert attack.
Sure, Pete did something really awful as a teenage boy, but he had clearly been living with an appropriate and painful level of remorse for his actions for all the intervening years. My sense was that his humanitarian work, in fact, was probably motivated in some way (probably unconsciously) by a sincere effort to atone for the harm he had done. I am really baffled by the majority of reactions to and judgments of him as a character, and by people's apparent willingness to accept the "it was all in good fun" insistence of his malevolent "friends."
To me, Pete is someone who simply needs some work with a good therapist to learn that let go of his need to be accepted by people who don't deserve to have such a fundamentally decent human being in their lives. His story is a cleverly over-the-top version of the ordinary, garden variety sadistic gaslighting to which a great many decent people are subjected to every day. I hope those who can most identify with him don't read critical responses to this movie in which they are further gaslighted by the suggestion that all of the toxic provocation to which Pete was very clearly subjected were in fact just figments of his own (and by implication, their own) head. If that's the ultimately message and impact of the movie, then, as comedy or horror or social commentary, it will have done more harm than good and deserves to disappear into the realm of the forgotten.
57 out of 69 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
