Reviewed by Alicia Glass
Based on a novel by the same name from Stephanie Perkins, the graduating class of Osborne High is stalked by a masked murderer, intent on exposing all their darkest secrets of their victims, and a gang of outcasts seems to be the only ones who can stop the killings.
The fictional town of Osborne, Nebraska, is about as high-school-trope-y as you can possibly get in a movie. There’s popular gay-hating jocks, rainbow children still in the closet, nerds with identity crises, racist student council members, even poor little rich kids excluded because their parents made riches by selling off the farms of other families. Osborne doesn’t seem like the ideal place to disappear into after our main character Makani Young (Sydney Park) did something really very bad at her previous high school, but whatever. Make sure you’ve got a map for the corn maze, and let’s dive into this!
So inevitably, the literal gay-bashing football jock Jackson Pace (Markian Tarasiuk) was the first to die, in his own house out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by photographic evidence of his crime against his homosexual classmate Caleb Greeley (Burkely Duffield). Killed by someone all in black wearing a mask that looks like Jacksons own face, for all his football-star size and strength Jackson was taken down by his own guilt and a hefty carving knife fairly easily.
The sensational nature of Jacksons death outs Caleb at school, and our outcast gang offers to let Caleb come sit with them during lunch. A lunch during which the student council president Katie Koons (Sarah Dugdale) proceeds to read out a letter in memoriam for Jackson, she claims, which also happens to quite smarmily out another one of our outcasts, the genderfluid child Darby (Jesse LaTourette), who has no desire to have such things discussed aloud, thank you. Katie proceeds to set up the memorial for Jackson in church, only to find herself chosen as the next victim, to the sound of her own voice giving a very racist podcast with some quite radical far-right-solution stylings. Again, the killer wears all black and a mask made to look like Katie’s own face.
Despite imposed curfews and a fair bit of terror circulating amongst the adults and kids, poor little rich boy Zach Sandford (Dale Whibley) thinks the best way to combat all this is to host a rager of a party while his dads away. High school kids are taking it upon themselves to get high, get drunk, get loaded whatever way they possibly can, plus sharing their supposed worst deeds amongst themselves so that hopefully the serial killer has one less target. Which, I mean, sounds like a solid theory, but since when are high schoolers actually honest with, well, anyone, much less each-other? Our main girl Makani is still quite reluctant to divulge her terrible burning secret, but most of the dubious sharing is forgotten when Zach proceeds to announce that he’s turned his fathers major secret, a room full of freaking Nazi paraphernalia, into receptacles for drug consumption!
Of course the killings continue, and the general consensus even from Makani herself at this point, is that the murderer is Makani’s ex boyfriend Ollie Larsson (Theodore Pellerin). Even Ollie admits that he’s on the outskirts of everything and everyone and can make a prime suspect, while surreptitiously taking Makani out when she can’t stand it anymore, for some late-night shadow-hidden car makeouts.
Other conflicts come to a head amid the deaths of other high school kids, and despite an attempt at taking Makani herself out, the film still seems to be trying to indicate that Makani herself is the killer. And while she’s certainly guilt-ridden about the fiery secret that led her and her beloved Gam (BJ Harrison) here to Osbourne, that whole situation turns out to be hazing madness, not malicious pre-intent. So with most of our main suspects either dead or logically out of the running, who could be the person running around wearing your face as they kill you?
Despite the killings still a-going on, Zach’s dad Skipper (William MacDonald) insists on holding a celebratory corn maze night, and here amongst the flames of selfishness and strange retribution is where we have our final confrontations. Who the masked murderer turns out to be, and their reasons for said killing spree, sort of makes sense from a certain point of view, but the whole thing feels rushed would have made a lot more sense if the film had bothered to explore it even a little bit more. Paying for the sins of your parents with death and blood works only if we care at all about the kid and their parents.
Guard your secrets along with the rest of the outcast gang in There’s Someone Inside Your House, on Netflix now!