ladybusiness | (Reply)

From:

I think I found the film not so much scary as very very intense. Sometimes that came in the form of suspense, sometimes fear, but a lot of the time it felt like a film that was really making me do a lot of emotional labour, in a good way. I'm not particularly disappointed in it as a horror film even though I agree that past a certain point it was no longer viscerally terrifying. The home invasion scenes though are very scary throughout.

I'm only half American myself (originally from Russia) and don't connect strongly with the idea of America personally, but I still found the film's grounding in America very powerful — I do think the film's message on that score applies cross-culturally, in this particular international moment. A lot of countries are gripped by jingoistic rhetoric and even deeper oppression of the lower classes, so for me to statement "We're Americans" reads as a surprisingly universal claim of co-citizenship. I initially said something like this in the draft of the post, but removed it in editing.