Daniel Stamm

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) While 13 Sins is not, strictly speaking, that bad of a movie, it has the bad luck of being squarely in a subgenre that I don’t like, which is the “ordinary people coerced into corruption via game.”  A lot of those have come out recently—you can pick off an entire list just by searching plot summaries for “dark web,” as many hand-wave “sadistic game shows for amoral billionaires… through the dark web!” as their plot justification. 13 Sins is slightly more subtle (and is adapted from an earlier Thai film), has some dark humour to it and actually manages a few fun plot twists along the way… but it remains a film about someone coerced into becoming a terrible person and I think that’s a cheap way to get thrills. “Kill this person or your family gets it” is about as exploitative as the genre gets, and there’s little narrative satisfaction from that. 13 Sins writer-director Daniel Stamm does understand that, at least, you have to go beyond that and so the film hits its best moments when it takes a step back into comedy (albeit dark, dark comedy), or multiplies its twisted plotting to unbelievable melodramatic heights. Mark Webber is not bad as an initially meek young man who becomes empowered by the amorality of the tasks he’s forced to complete (an interesting wrinkle in itself), with Ron Perlman lending a lot of gravitas to an otherwise minor role, and Rutina Wesley being a welcome island of wholesomeness in the middle of a darkly amoral film. There’s some polish to 13 Sins’ visual style, even if the writing is uneven both in tone and content. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I have to recognize that it’s slightly better than most comparable films.