Director: Kyle Couch
Screenplay: Kyle Couch
Year: 2020
After some creatures caused an event known as The Crisis, David resorts to his survival skills to keep himself alive. David finds refuge in a nearby forest, where he lives in a camping tent. Soon another survivor named Mary gets to the area where David is referred and starts questioning his survival tactics against the creatures that menace their survival.
I would start by saying that I found this movie at a recognized digital platform where it was cataloged as a thriller and creature feature and I decided to give it a go. Well, let it be known that this movie doesn’t comply with neither of these categories, rather it is an emotional drama with the excuse of some creatures that have no other function than to keep the protagonists in one place and whose existence is only explained in the last few minutes of the movie. Everything else that happens between the protagonists has nothing to do with a horror movie.
Most of the movie unfolds as a drama between two characters that get to know each other in the midst of an apocalyptic crisis in which some creatures have devastated the world and the survivors live in remote and desolated places. David (Tim Kaiser) so far has been successful in keeping himself alive, but an oversight causes him to get wounded, and luckily Mary (Lulu Dahl; “The Yousers”) was nearby to help him. Since this moment the movie turns into 90% dialogue between both characters and it's a task to go through it.
The main issue this movie has is that it takes too long to get to its big revelation, in which everything that seems to not make sense is explained. As a short film focused in the important parts of the plot and getting quicker to the revelation, this would have been an excellent movie, but as a full-length feature overloaded with dialogue, mostly unnecessary, the idea of director and screenwriter Kyle Couch (“Life Prescribed”) dilutes and not many viewers will reach until the moment where the unexpected revelation takes place. Also, as a horror movie fan, I feel like the creatures were misused and they could have been used more in function of the revelation.
As if the amount of dialogue wasn’t enough of a problem, the delivery of these dialogues by the actors finishes it off. The acting of Kaiser and Dahl doesn’t help to get interested in the characters and fails to inject emotion and rather feels as if they were reading lines aloud. Of course, the final revelation is emotive and would have much more strength if we were to grow interested in the characters as the story goes, but neither the quality of the dialogues nor the acting helps to make this happen.
Categorizing “The Tent” as a thriller and creature feature feels like it stretches too much the meaning of these categories. Rather it is a drama overloaded with dialogue, that ends up drowning a great and emotive final twist. Having this been done as a short film trimming down much of the unnecessary dialogue and focusing on the final twist, as well as using more the almost nonexistent horror element to propel this twist, it would have ended in a way better movie, but the final product that we have is too tasteless and hard to digest.
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