Seduction Review – Eligible Singles Dying for Romance in the Saw-Style Dating Game | film

VSometimes a movie just doesn’t work, and unfortunately this low budget horror movie is one of those movies. The premise isn’t the problem: A sexy young woman lures six eligible young men to her family’s country pile for a romantic weekend, only to reveal to the men that they are now trapped in a reality TV-meets-Saw farce where they will struggle to survive. On paper, a bachelorette-meets-female game of jigsaw might sound like fun.

The biggest problem is that the film never achieves the necessary suspension of disbelief; Horror movies should feel somewhat real or deliberately absurd while you’re watching them; But this feels like student theatre. You can pick out interesting individual moments that could have been something, but you’ll never be inside the action, and you’ll want the characters to escape (or die).

It doesn’t help that right out of the gate it feels like the movie can’t decide how to start. Is this a goofy folk horror film about a man escaping into the rain at night, a torture porn deal with a man tied to a bed, or a twisted family in an elegant, chilled mansion where bad things are about to happen? It’s all three, but not in a way that feels forced; The effect is like switching between channels.

Perhaps if things were staged with more conviction they might work, but there’s a sense of vulnerability to much of it – sometimes quite literally, since the humble plastic cable ties and flimsy gags used to restrain the unlucky young men give the impression that they are largely escapable.