‘The Furies’ Review: Dir. Tony D’Aquino [Frightfest 2019]

The Furies review: What if The Hunger Games was on a lot of crack and pushed the premise to the max? That’s the question Tony D’Aquino asks with The Furies – a horror-thriller about a deadly game of survival.

Kayla (Airlie Dodds) and Maddie (Ebony Vagulans) are best friends about to head into college when they’re brutally attacked, drugged and kidnapped one night. When Kayla wakes, she’s in a woodland area of sorts – alone and disorientated. As she sets out to find her friend and make sense of what happened to them, it quickly dawns on her that she’s being hunted – the beauty in a beauty and beast-type equation where every beast is trying to find (and protect) their beauty, but killing the other beauties – and beasts – as they do in what turns out to be a twisted game of “last pair standing”. As Kayla uncovers this, her search for Maddie becomes a race against time.

Sound fun? Well, it’s really not. Sadly, The Furies is nothing more than generic thriller fare we’ve seen done to death. Think The Purge, even The Hunger Games or really any other “people are being hunted and have to fight to the death for rich people’s entertainment” type film and you’ve seen it before. The Furies adds nothing new to the mix; saying that, it’s not even as entertaining an execution of the formula as other endeavours. It’s mostly dull, with few surprises, and little in the way of good story or characterisation; there is the occasional good bit of gore, and all the sequences involving the beasts are pretty entertaining but, sadly, there’s not actually a lot of that. Instead, there’s a lot of Kayla trying to figure out what’s happening and bumping into other girls and explaining to them what’s going on and a lot of getting upset about the situation.

This is fine when the film is in its initial stretch, but it quickly gets repetitive and dull given this is really all the film does. We don’t care for any of the characters because the characterisation is near non-existent.

The performances themselves are either too undercooked or too over-the-top, with no actor really able to bring conviction to their role. The logic is also just completely inane; D’Aquino’s screenplay goes out of its way to establish certain rules and ideas then either contradicts them or dismisses them entirely which leaves it feeling a little mawkish and tactless.

The film has its moments but they’re silver linings amidst an otherwise very incompetent, bland offering.