Till Death (2021)

It's been a while since I'm counting the length when selecting a movie for watching. It's probably not the best criteria, but it's practical when the allocated time for this starts after 1 AM. "Till Death" is a short movie, otherwise I probably wouldn't have watched it. It would've been a loss. Not that we're talking about a masterpiece, but it was surprisingly original.

What we have here is a more peculiar revenge story, which rapidly turns into a survival movie. Moving 10 years back, we find Emma (Megan Fox) as victim of a violent robbery attempt, ending up marrying the young attorney who's sending the attacker behind bars. Years pass, and he's advancing his career to owning a successful law firm, but their relation gets cold. The movie actually starts when Emma's ending an extramarital affair, just before her marriage anniversary. Her husband organizes a "gift" for this occasion in the form of a romantic evening in a vacation house by a lake, but that's just a prequel for what follows. He decides to put a bullet to his head the following morning, after handcuffing himself to his wife. Well, I already said something you don't get from the trailer :) Something else we don't see there is how elaborate is the sick payback plan. Light spoiler - eventually we find that the deceased probably experienced some "remorse" after sending his wife's attacker to jail and decides to end his life only after the guy's release, leaving him some diamonds as compensation. The clause for getting into possession of these, however, is not that simple.

All the context and whatever else the trailer provides might seem a bit unrealistic, but the the movie slowly delivers small parts that add sense, turning the action in a tensed race for survival. That's actually the catchy factor here - the action is unpredictable enough, although you might not expect that. Emma must deal with the isolated house during a cold winter, carrying a dead heavy husband, who's brain was passed before the bullet by all kinds of thoughts on how to make the "separation" from his wife harder to accomplish. And I can say that either Megan Fox fits perfectly to the role, or she took some acting lessons since last time I saw her in a movie ( I know I'm mean :-) ). Not the last thing: although we clearly have a macabre element, and despite what the trailer might suggest, the violence level in the movie is probably at a third of the average "The Walking Dead" episode. So, to conclude, I think the movie is quite underrated. It's not so easy these days to find a complex enough story, starting from a complicated idea - how to survive a post-mortem revenge - within a thriller that respects its genre = more tension, less VFX.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5