AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Paint the town red review1/13/2024 ![]() The Last Kingdom's Amelia Clarkson brings stoic adolescent earnestness to Roch's best friend Wren, whose tempestuous family situation is a constant stress. Through talented Metal Lords star Isis Hainsworth, protagonist Rochelle's deep grief, sense of isolation, and bravado-shielded shame over her family's low-income home is a focal point. And though, as a tech-horror fable, the series feels like an elongated Black Mirror episode, the 10 episodes allows more time for the characters to individually resonate with the audience.Īs they drink crappy booze and play Guess Who? together, each member of the fondly named "Dickheads" group is holding onto secret dreams, desires, and shame, whether it be their insecurities in the social hierarchy, their sexuality, or their home situations, thanks to believably understated performances from the young but accomplished cast. Not just keeping things within the app, however, Red Rose's twisting narrative and all-encompassing online mystery conveys the pure horror of being hacked, the sinking feeling of having your reputation smeared by something out of your control on social media. But it's the sheer desperation of the characters who use the app in Red Rose that makes them easy targets for its manipulative trap. It looks like the type of unregulated app you'd download and immediately think, yeah, my personal data is gone. But tech-based scares in Red Rose feel closer to home at times, and it may have something to do with the basic design in the app's UX - there's something in the app's sans serif font that makes it seem believably sketchy. ![]() You can't just flick a few smart lights on and off to scare us. It's an established horror technique, recently utilised in the smart home setting of the BBC and HBO's The Girl Before, and it's not without risk. In the series' tightly edited opening scene, a terrified girl clutching her phone, Alyssa Penrose (Robyn Cara), is tormented by a creepy AR presence on her smart TV before she's menaced by her Alexa Electra-connected smart home, with a cacophony of lights and music making a horror show of her home. 'Nightmare Alley' director Guillermo del Toro explains what makes carnival noir so terrifying ![]() In Red Rose, characters hold their smartphones up to reveal figures they can't see IRL, and it's genuinely frightening a sequence involving a YouTube-assisted, Bluetooth-enabled exorcism, in which an unseen form slowly creeps behind a character on a phone screen, had me pacing the room. It's a tool that terrified the hell out of us in Host - if you can forget the scene in which an AR face filter attaches itself to something we can't see, good for you. In particular, the series uses augmented reality to chilling effect, as a key means for characters to see presences on their beloved devices that may or may not be there. Characters cradle their phones in every scene, doomscrolling with the screen six inches from their face or lazily checking social media mid-conversation. In Red Rose, directors Lisa Siwe, Ramón Salazar, and Henry Blake wield various forms of tech as the vessel for scares in the Clarkson Twins' well-woven script, with our ever-precious smartphones being the main culprit. From Rob Savage's Host and Mr Harrigan's Phone, Unfriended to Cam, and of course, Black Mirror, directors have been dabbling in the scariest ways they can use digital interfaces, tech devices, social media, livestreaming, apps, chat rooms, and video calling software in their work.Ĭhuck the phone. We're living in a tech-obsessed reality, so technology-based horror has long established a foothold as a subgenre, with some releases better at making us want to ditch the digital life than others. Red Rose explores the dangers of being constantly connected. But as complicated protagonist Rochelle (Isis Hainsworth) uses the app more and more, it's clear providing comfort isn't its main functionality - it's deadly control. Spread through smishing with a dodgy-looking link sent via text, the Red Rose app initially seems like a supportive chatbot, offering a "welcome to the new you," as AR beauty filters akin to those on TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram present an idealized, smiling image of the user.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |