A little bit of nuance and a delicate hand can go a long way towards making a movie - or, with their absence, breaking it. The premise behind 'One of us' is very promising, and it certainly caught my eye. It takes little time at all for the film itself to begin to show its difficulties, and the factors that limit our engagement. It's extraordinarily fast-paced, and almost forcefully brusque and heavy-handed. Many of its constituent parts are well done in and of themselves, but don't fit the tenor of what the picture is trying to do (immaculate hair and makeup work, for example); other aspects (not least those small touches intended to pointedly intone a horror element) are cliched and overdone; little or nothing is Just Right (this is also weirdly overproduced). "Cliched and overdone" also absolutely applies to dialogue, which is often entirely too on the nose; characters mostly feel like sketches that weren't completed, though some (such as Sophie) are downright excessive and gauche as written. Scene writing and too many plot points oscillate between lacking and unconvincing, forced and inorganic, or even imitative and false. With all this in mind, onto what can the narrative meaningfully latch, form its roots, and grow? What could we truly hope for in terms of character development? I recognize acting skill in the cast, but what can their best efforts hope to achieve?
Though not all of them fit together or are necessary, there are lots of great ideas in this feature. Horror, thriller, drama - ostensibly with a psychological edge. That's what the premise suggests; that's what 'One of us' could have been and tries to be. In writing and in execution, however, the result is at best uneven; it seems sometimes like the movie doesn't actually known what it wanted to be. The picture is far too blunt and unsubtle to earnestly play in the space that it wants to, and so becomes weak, common, or even overbearing. I appreciate the effort everyone put into this; I don't think the finished product is altogether bad. It's simply not everything that it should have been, and would have been if more mindful care were taken at large. I'd love to say that I like this more than I do, yet there's an emptiness where the best impact should be. There are far worse titles one could find themselves watching, yet unless you're a huge fan of someone involved, I also can't particularly imagine any specific reason to spend time with this one. Let's just say that 'One of us' is a disappointing "almost" and leave it at that.
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