FORMAT: DVD / RELEASE DATE: NOVEMBER 23RD
Death of Me, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (taking a break from grisly Saw duties), takes an intriguing and slightly disturbing initial premise and then proceeds to do nothing of interest with it. Holidaying on a remote Thai island Neil (Luke Hemsworth) and Christine (Maggie Q) wake up after a night of wild partying. There’s blood everywhere, their passports are missing and they have no idea what happened the night before. With a typhoon heading their way they decide to get off the island but with no tickets or passports they are turned away and forced to try and work out what’s going on. Neil checks his phone for photographic clues only to find a shocking video where he appears to kill Christine and bury her in a shallow grave. Then a tribal talisman keeps appearing around Christine’s neck and the phone’s footage shows mysterious bar worker Madee (Kat Ingkarat) serving them a strange hallucinogenic Buddhist concoction. The perplexed pair soon discover that reality appears to be twisted upside down and inside out and no-one – least of all the audience – has any idea what’s real and what’s a drug-induced fantasy.
Death of Me ties itself up in knots so quickly you’re more likely to be exasperated by its obscurity than engrossed in its mystery. As logic and narrative fly out of the window, the film piles on any macabre cliché it can think of – voodoo rites, repeated hallucinatory horrors, even a touch of Wicker Man ritualising – in its desperation to make us think it’s cleverer than it is. We’re not fooled. The location footage is attractive and Maggie Q does a damned good puzzled face but Death of Me is pretty much dead on arrival.
