"The Privilege" REVIEW

The Privilege is the English name given to Das Privileg Die Auserwahlten, or "the privilege of the chosen." I have chosen to watch this movie, and oh boy, that doesn't feel like a privilege.

Around an hour and ten minutes into The Privilege, someone says, "We have to finish it, Finn." And I thought: Do we really though? Couldn't we just call it here?

If you've seen a horror movie in the last couple of decades, there's a decent chance that you've seen something incredibly similar to The Privilege. The movie begins with a ghostly encounter. Someone dies. The survivor is traumatised. Time passes. Then the evil thing begins to return.

You might be thinking: that's a pretty broad description of a horror story. Lots of horror stories feature an evil thing that returns.

Okay, so let's go deeper on the tropes. Spunky lesbian side-kick? Present. Protagonist with one facial expression who just kinda mopes through the plot? Present. Exorcist who is brought in to help with the investigation only to discover that the evil is actually too powerful? Present.

I don't speak German, so I experienced The Privilege in translation. Maybe in the original German the dialogue is less awkward, but as it stands everything is on the nose, and there's no nuance. This leads to terrible characterisation because none of the dialogue feels human. Everything feels artificial. When terrible things happen, the authorities blame it on "drugs." It's unconvincing, and it leads to key moments in the plot having all of the subtlety of an after-school special.

You kids take all that Czech shit, and then you just go insane.

Nuanced, clever dialogue, that.

Are drugs the only thing you can come up with?

Thankfully, the dialogue never gets worse than this drugs talk with the cops, but unfortunately it never gets much better either.

On the topic of subtlety, this movie employs one of the lamest tropes in the horror milieu: the students are learning about something pretty dang obscure in school early in the movie, and wouldn't you know it: that happens to be a key feature of the movie's conclusion.

So what is the story anyways?

Finn, the mopey dude with only one facial expression, was traumatised when his sister jumped to her death years before. His trauma was especially exacerbated by the fact that his sister attempted to drag him to his death as well. He's still haunted by her death, and his perception of the world might not be totally reliable. He's on medication that's supposed to help his problems, but he wonders if it is actually making it worse.

The story starts with him very passive. He just kinda floats around from scene to scene. What does he want? To talk to the cute girl at school. What does he do in order to get what he wants? Not much.

To be clear: trauma is messy, and it can have lifelong impacts on people. However, this also leads to some pretty uninspired pacing for much of the beginning of the movie. This is a story about things happening to Finn. Finn himself does very little to impact those things until pretty late in the story. Instead, he just sort of bounces from one cliche to another.

He's a teenager, so of course he has to go a dance party. He sneaks out at night. He tries to protect his sister, but because his perception of the world is a little bit wobbly, he freaks her out instead.

By the end of the movie, some interesting elements have emerged, but the process it takes to get there is tedious.

This is a problem that plagues a lot of horror movies, and I wish that it didn't. I love a slow burn as much as the next person, but a slow burn has to be handled carefully. Just like with a literal slow burn, you have to work hard to protect those embers of interest and fan that into something special. Because if that fire goes out, you're just left with something cold and lifeless.

The Privilege is cold and lifeless.

Like far too many horror movies, The Privilege is so clumsy with establishing the world that it wastes time boring the audience. This leaves the last chunk of the movie feeling rushed, which is a bummer since that's when things are actually getting interesting.

As well, the movie plays with this stupid, is-it-all-in-his-head dilemma, which wouldn't be terrible except that a lot of early scenes don't actually make much sense when seen with the context of later scenes. The ambiguity feels like it's there because hey, lots of horror movies use ambiguity to represent the struggle of mental health. It doesn't really benefit the plot, and it's just another way that the movie wastes time.

So the characters aren't interesting, the plot is cliche and poorly paced, and the dialogue stinks.

At least some of the visuals are kinda neat?

"The Privilege" is available via Netflix.