Uneven Social Satire Rather Than Straightforward Horror

oppligerfj-59872

I'm going to have to reveal spoilers for screenwriter Brea Grant & director Natasha Kermani's 2020 "horror" movie Lucky in order to adequately critique the movie. But dropping spoilers may also be a favor to the potential viewer. The movie is a very thinly veiled analogy to structural victimization of women by the patriarchy consisting of both men and women that have accepted the established social order. But the film is drastically ineffective because it doesn't seem to have a clear or consistent perspective on its own argument. The movie initially depicts the socio-political victimization of women as a joke. But the film never actually clarifies when this victimization is supposed to be taken seriously. Moreover, the victimization is initially depicted as a man's problem, and the movie takes great pains to bluntly explain that men and women handle stress and antagonism differently. So the film bluntly reinforces the stereotype that women are hysterical, emotional wrecks while men are rational and capable beings who smartly and capably handle their stresses. Moreover, the movie suggests that victimization of women only occurs to adult women. Discrimination and victimization doesn't affect children and adolescent women nor elderly women. And this sort of social discrimination against women begins arbitrarily sometime after a woman has matured into adulthood. The movie also undercuts its own political message by lacking an ending. The protagonist initially tries to oppose her own routine victimization. But then she simply gives up. She abandons her friends and fellow women, exasperatedly concedes that she's a frail and needy woman that needs a man to support her, and seemingly ultimately just acknowledges that her new role is that of victim. So if there's any true "horror" in the film, it's within the theme that women are intractably inferior to men, and women will always remain selfish, hysterical, subservient pawns to men. The movie starts out as a subtly hilarious satire like a horror version of Groundhog Day. But when it eventually reveals itself to be not a horror movie but actually an illustrated analogy for a political statement, the viewer immediately realizes that the film is overlong, even at 83 minutes, in its attempt to bluntly preach an over-obvious moral stance which the film itself doesn't even believe.

score 5/10

oppligerfj-59872 1 November 2020

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw6224357/