Joey Stewart

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) As I grow older, I have noticed that I’m increasingly liable to assess films from a moralistic perspective, especially in the case of horror films. I can give an easy pass on good-natured comedies featuring career criminals, but the more a horror film becomes nihilistic and gory, the more I will openly question why it exists. More horror films at least have the basics of a morality play — killers get killed, bad people get punished, plucky heroines survive. And then there’s tripe like The Final, which seems to be running on horror moviemaking autopilot without first stopping to check the basis of a narrative. Let’s recap for those lucky enough to not have seen the film: The Final opens on mild bullying of the “outcasts” (most of whom would be completely at ease in a normal high school) by “the populars.”  But if you’re expecting this to go the route of Carrie or even Tamara (which, as dull as it was, actually understood the fundamentals of a narrative) with extreme torment being met by revenge, you’re in for an unpleasant shock as the outcasts drug, bind, terrorize and torture the populars. Much of the film is spent in a haze of confusion, as the nominal heroes behave as psycho villains (to the point of gunning down one of their own), while the nominal victims are still reprehensible to the point of not caring for them. While The Final does try to have some kind of character with a neutral alignment (swept with the populars despite not being a bully and then escaping to get help), his subplot quickly degenerates into a quasi-comic sideshow that doesn’t bring much to the film. I’m not saying that The Final’s premise is hopeless —I can see several ways in which “bullied become the bullies” is an entirely workable premise, even working within the constrains of such an artificial distinction. But The Final is so terrible at execution that any possible improvement would require far more wit that the script or director Joey Stewart can bring to the table. You’ll have a hard time finding a film as confused as The Final — it simply leaves an unpleasant impression that the filmmakers are similarly morally confused and that the film is a sociopathic reflection of their lack of moral compass.