After an effective opening with a young woman, trussed up in a car trunk, being driven out to a remote spot, calmed down by her abductor and then brutally strangled, A Horrible Way To Die settles into a gloomy variation on the familiar serial-killer-as-ordinary-Joe routine.

Sarah (Amy Seimetz) is a recovering alcoholic whose ex-boyfriend Garrick Turrell (A.J. Bowen) is serving a lengthy prison sentence for a string of murders. Attempting to start life anew, she embarks on a tentative relationship with Kevin (Joe Swanberg), a fellow addict she has met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Meantime Garrick escapes police custody while being transported in a prison van and leaves a string of corpses behind him as he makes his way towards a reunion with Sarah, who was responsible for his capture and subsequent incarceration.

On one level the film seems to be about the perils of addiction – Garrick's to murder, Sarah's to booze – and how it can lead to places we would rather not venture. The emphasis is squarely on the characters and their two distinct story strands: Sarah's road to recovery and her mundane job at a dental surgery, Garrick's escape and reversion to old habits (most of the killings take place offscreen) and how the threads weave themselves together.

Unfortunately, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett adopt a dislocated, ultimately incoherent approach which turns the viewer away from the story rather than drawing them into it. The narrative meanders when it should be more focused, the dialogue is astonishingly banal and the characters and situations dull instead of interesting. Bowen and Seimetz do their best but they are finally defeated by the material in front of them.

Worse still is Wingard's directing style. A shaky, hand-held camera is dominant throughout the film, shots are sometimes misframed and waver in and out of focus, sometimes focusing on nothing in particular (the backs of people's heads, trees in the distance), at other moments the lighting is too dark and at others the pace becomes too sluggish to hold the attention. It's difficult to discern an aesthetic reason for such technical ineptitude because the effect works completely against the film and makes for irritating rather than uncomfortable viewing.

Finally, with a quarter of an hour to spare there's an out-of-left-field plot twist that almost compensates for the tedium of the previous seventy minutes. However, by that time you'll be past the point of caring, which is a pity as there was enough potential here for an interesting character-driven horror film.

LLOYD HAYNES

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