Telling tale of a group of rogue youngsters, Behave is directed by Francesco Gabriele. The group of friends is taken to a villa on the outskirts of London after one of their friends passes away. They are fully prepared to enjoy the holiday getaway but to their shocking surprise, it seems like a unknown creature has followed them.
The group staying at Villa Helen is expected to unveil the underlying deep secret that is responsible behind the villa’s strange occurrences when they are on ‘relaxing’ vacation. The Gardener, who is creepy by the way, a old lonely Landlord and the world famous TikTok star all become suspicious as the entity starts to reveal itself. Everyone is invited to join and witness Keira, Andrea, Callum, India, and Lily, all supervised by Polly, Andrea’s mother, who is on a mission to escape from the mysteries walls. The group was instructed on how to behave in modern society, but learned the hard way about who to trust and who not to.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Fans of slasher flicks will surely enjoy the movie. This seemed very much like the last wave of slashers that came after the infamous Scream franchise but did not dive deeply into the meta world of slashers knowing they are part of a movie. These include Valentine, Urban Legends 2: Final Cut which I will remind are NOT the same as the first UL film, and especially Cry Wolf. Cry Wolf had a cast of characters that a viewer could root for, and also hoped to see them be brutally slaughtered just like the cast of Behave.
As expected from a slasher movie, Behave has plenty of potential slashing victims. The possible suspects includes Nancy, the witty school decorum teacher, Polly, the group leader slash teacher, the overly traumatized gardener that seems to do a horrible job planting flowers around the villa, and even the kids!
There isn’t an overabundance of kills in the movie, but there are plenty of surprises when the kids jump scare each other, as in one instance when a kid has a bad nightmare… Or did they? The ball gets rolling 53 minutes into the movie, India, played by Lauren Pepler is the first one to disappear through the hands of the killer that was first shown in the ‘pre-credit’ sequence of the movie.
This suggests that there is more enigma than fear in Behave; however, that doesn’t have to be a problem. There was still mystery whether there was a killer/stalker/ghost at the property or if it was purely in Keira’s (Ema Kosac) mind.
It is that mystery what is real and what is fabrication? And are the kids actually at risk? Which helps in keeping your attention on the screen because there’s not much else to support the interest of the viewers. The characters are all some kind of ridiculous stereotype that is more irritating than anything else. Other than Kiera, not a single member of the ensemble cast, including the adults, is appealing, which means that Behave is far too short on the kind of sympathy necessary to make anyone care about what happens to anyone in the film, and so, rather than being terrified, you find yourself cheering for the killer to get rid of the entire cast.
Sadly, when they do eventually reveal the murderer, which is just over ten minutes after it is established that this film does contain a murderer, it is such an anticlimactic moment. The result of the reveal is extremely cliché. It is something that has been overused in the industry and Behave does absolutely nothing to innovate when it comes to giving it a spin or reinterpreting it.
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