In an effort/promise to promote female directors, writers, and actors of color Welcome to Blumhouse in partnership with Amazon has released 4 films with a variety of melanin at every corner or stories with female leads. I thank them and applaud them for their effort. I will never take that away.
Now let’s get to a review of one of their releases
Premise: After suffering a mild stroke, Judith Albright (Barbara Hershey) reluctantly moves into a historic nursing home where she becomes convinced a supernatural force is killing the residents.
What I Liked: It’s not always you get a horror film cast primarily by sexagenarians and septuagenarians. It good to see that kind of diversity. It reminds me of Cocoon, the 1985 blockbuster that tells the story of the residents of a retirement house finding a fountain of youth created by aliens.
What I Didn’t Like: I tried to think of other thinks I liked about The Manor but everything I started to wrote related to elements that could’ve made the story better. I have concerns that the writer didn’t really understand what makes nursing homes and senior housing so frightening. It’s the fear of being forgotten, of losing your mind, of being mistreated, and of dying slowly. None of that never really gets a chance to settle and grow within the movie.
The protagonist is a bit unbelievable as some who is disabled. She suffers a stroke, likely her first one, (I wasn’t quite paying attention). Her response is to sign herself up for a nursing home, and the entire time, she never really exhibits the ramifications of it throughout the rest of the film. She’s clearly capable of living independent. Save for one possible unexplained hallucination, she’s fine. So why such an antagonistic relationship with her daughter who isn’t really keeping her there against her will?
The plot twist are fairly obvious right up until the end, which doesn’t really pay off well, because at now time has Judith our protagonist long for anything other than escape.
Verdict: I wanted to like this film. It had the potential to really delve into those ripe terror elements that we should all fear when we get a certain age. However because it lacks a real understanding of those things, it comes off as mundane. There were other narrative choices that could’ve been made to elevate the horror. The Manor is likely the weakest of the Blumhouse collection this year. It actually might do you some good to skip it.