Held: Tepid horror movie about a 'smart house' holding a couple hostage is not that smart
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
In the new horror movie, Held, a couple are taken hostage by their Airbnb-like high-end rental’s smart security system, which, in an electronically-altered gravelly voice, begins to give them directions on how to behave as a proper couple.
Perhaps taking a cue from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which treated race relations through the filter of a Twilight Zone episode, Held, aims at doing the same for for post-#metoo feminism.
Jill Awbrey and Bart Johnson are rightly unhappy with their high-end rental.
Beyond the premise though, Held is pretty much stale ginger ale, not fresh, no fizz, thinly acted and tepidly paced. While it’s passably interesting, watching co-directors Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing (The Gallows) explore the antiseptic house as if watching a a real estate video, the accompanying thin drama drifts into episodic genre violence and doubtful logic.
After a brief ugly flashback of a young woman locked in the back of a car about to be sexually assaulted, we cut to Emma (screenwriter Jill Awbrey), presumably the same woman, years later, in the backseat of another vehicle, as she is being driven by a creepy driver (Rez Kempton) to a remote rural retreat.
Emma, and her husband, Henry (Bart Johnson) are travelling separately to a marriage-mending anniversary in their fancy rental. Emma arrives first, takes a swim in the indoor pool, gets tipsy on wine and is enjoying her weekend, at least until Henry shows up.
That evening, Emma and Henry have a nightcap of some spiked whiskey and pass out. While they’re unconscious, a ninja-like masked stranger comes into their bedroom and injects electronic implants behind their ears. When the couple awaken, they find themselves locked and shuttered in the house, where they are subjected to enforced marital counselling by the growling male voice.
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Compelled to obey by the shock collar style implants, the couple are marched through an itinerary of archaic misogynist marriage lessons of the cringeworthy tips of you’d find in the 1955 issue of Housekeeping Monthly’s The Good Wife’s Guide.
A husband must open a door for his wife, growls the Voice. A wife should prepare a husband’s dinner while he reads her a romantic poem. Then the husband compliments the wife on the food.
Later, they are ordered to make love, whether they want to or not. If either disobeys, they can expect a high-voltage shock to go rattling through their skull.
An observant viewer might note that there are only two people central to this plot, and the odds that one of them is gas-lighting the other are about 50-50. But, for a while, the evil electronics system is carrying the villain load.
Anyone who has seen The Simpson’s House of Whacks episode (Treehouse of Horrors XII, Season 3, Episode 1) knows that smart homes, once they get to know their residents, lose all respect for them. Soon, the know-it-all House Voice brings up an incident of infidelity, and then casts and directs a revenge scenario which suggests an over-familiarity with the Saw torture series.
Perhaps the house is overdue for a software update. For a far more powerful example of misogyny-as-horror, see Saw writer Leigh Whannell’s most recent film, The Invisible Man.
Held’s distributors have requested that reviewers not reveal the twist ending to the film, though calling the resolution a “twist” is a bit grandiose: Better think of it as a escape hatch, or maybe an alibi.
Directed by Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing. Written by Jill Awbrey. Starring: Jill Awbrey, Bart Johnson, Rez Kempton. Held is available on Apple TV/iTunes and other VOD platforms and can be seen on April 9 in select theatres.