Slender Man (2018) Review

"He gets in your head like a virus!"

-Wren

A group of friends hear about the legend of Slender Man, a mysterious figure who supposedly abducts kids and teenagers.  Of course, the friends find a video online that will summon Slender Man.  A few days after watching the video, one of them goes missing.  Now the others have to find a way to save their friend and stop Slender Man from taking the rest of them.

What Works:

Don't worry, this segment will be brief.  I will commend Joey King, who plays Wren, one of the teenagers for her performance  She acts the hell out of this movie.  She is really the only interesting character in the film and the character herself isn't even interesting, it's all Joey King's performance.  She really sells her fear and paranoia.

The only other compliment I have for Slender Man is there are exactly three mildly creepy sequences.  One where they are watching YouTube videos about Slender Man, which I've seen myself and have always found mildly creepy, one brief vision with some decent imagery, and the 3rd act has one creepy visual that actually works.  But that is all I've got in the positive section.

What Sucks:

This movie is trash.  Apart from the previously mentioned Wren, all of the characters in this movie suck.  They're not even wildly unlikable teens like in Unfriended.  They are boring, flat, dull characters.  They have no personality and could not possibly be less interesting.  I didn't care at all if anything bad happened to them.

Even worse is our main protagonist, Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), who is boring for the first half of the movie, but becomes very unlikeable in the second half.  As soon as things get difficult she straight up abandons the rest of her friends.  Why is she our protagonist?  She's a terrible friend and I actually wanted her to just go missing.  Wren should have been the main character.  She was at least interesting to watch.  Hallie was just awful.

Not only are the characters boring, but the story is supremely uninteresting.  I like Slender Man.  I played the video game and it scared the hell out of me.  I've always found him to be creepy.  I could make a more interesting Slender Man movie in my sleep.  I just wanted this one to end.  I cannot stress enough how bored I was.  Most of the scares aren't scary, there is no humor, the characters suck, and the filmmakers didn't do anything to interest me in the story.  Just all around poor execution.

There are also some subplots which never get resolved and seem straight up abandoned.  There is a lot of sequences that were in the first trailer that weren't even in the movie.  For whatever reason they were cut out and the stories involving Chloe (Jaz Sinclair) and Tom (Alex Fitzalan) are just dropped from the narrative without any real explanation.

Finally, a lot of this movie is out of focus, I'm guessing intentionally, but to makes things worse a lot of this movie is extremely dark in terms of lighting.  I'm guessing this was also intentional.  The point is; it's tough to see what is going on.  Movies are a visual medium, when I can't see what is going on, that's a problem.

Verdict:

Slender Man is one of the worst movies I have seen this year.  The characters are boring, the protagonist is unlikable, the story is uninteresting, there are too many unresolved subplots, and the movie is difficult to watch because it's hard to see what's going on.  There are exactly three mildly creepy moments and a surprisingly good performance from Joey King, who is way too good for this film.  All around, Slender Man sucks.

 2/10: Awful