Netflix's 'Don't Move' Scrapes the Bottom of the Barrell of the Don't Do Stuff Horror Genre

I appreciate the trend in sensory deprivation horror thrillers. In A Quiet Place, it was, “Don’t make a sound.” In Bird Box, “Don’t look.” In Hush, “Don’t speak.” And in Don’t Breathe, well, the title says it all. The latest entry from directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto is Don’t Move. This time, our protagonist must escape certain death without being able to move a muscle. This one doesn’t quite live up to its predecessors.

Kelsey Asbille (Yellowstone) stars as Iris, a woman devastated by the recent loss of her child, who fell from a cliff while Iris looked away for a moment. Returning to the scene to mourn, she considers ending her own life, only to be dissuaded by a charming passerby named Richard (Finn Wittrock) — who quickly proves not so charming. Richard abducts Iris and injects her with a paralytic, which gives her only 20 minutes before her body becomes completely immobile. She uses that short window to try to escape but eventually succumbs to paralysis, forced to fight off Richard without the ability to move.

You might think it’s a setup with limited possibilities, and you’d be right! For a brief moment, Iris communicates with a stranger (Moray Treadwell) by blinking, but after he’s quickly dispatched, Iris is left mostly helpless, stalling for time until the paralytic wears off. Meanwhile, Richard faces his own interruptions — an inquisitive cop, an ill-timed call from his wife — all minor obstacles that delay his plan.

While not a terrible movie, Don’t Move definitely scrapes the bottom of the sensory deprivation genre barrel. Asbille is left with little to do but blink and tap a finger for long stretches of the film, while Wittrock’s performance doesn’t add anything new to the generic creepy white-guy serial killer.

The premise isn’t necessarily the problem; after all, even a film about escaping a blind man during a house robbery, like Don’t Breathe, was made tense and compelling by Fede Alvarez’s deft direction. Schindler and Netto, however, fail to elevate Don’t Move beyond the ranks of a mediocre Netflix thriller. It’s ultimately disposable, crafted to snare attention for a quick streaming peak before fading into oblivion — unlikely to be remembered, referenced, or missed ever again when it inevitably falls off the charts after a week.