Fear the Night | Review
Maggie Q in Fear the Night
Violent Night: LaBute Recruits Maggie Q as B-Movie Action Queen
By Nicholas Bell | Published on July 21, 2023
It’s a tale as old as time - a group of unsuspecting women assailed by murderers and rapists while they strive to survive the night, and Neil LaBute isn’t bringing anything exactly new to a bachelorette party from hell in his latest, Fear the Night. Technically a Vetsploitation survival film greatly enhanced by a lead performance from Maggie Q, it’s not so much a return to form for LaBute as it is a welcome improvement from the pair of formidably unappealing misfires he debuted last year (including the fallow vampire flick House of Darkness and the tepid Out of the Blue, an unnecessary rehashing of James M. Cain’s noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice). However, it’s still in keeping with LaBute’s eternal gender based interests, where women are forced to confront the inherent misogyny of men (especially when men fraternize), and those who survive either have learned to harness their feminine wiles or adopt a masculine persona. This offering ends up in the latter camp of those two binaries.
Tes (Maggie Q) is an Iraqi war veteran who seems to despise her sister Beth (Kat Foster). The feeling is apparently mutual, but they’re stuck together for the weekend to support their younger sister and attend her bachelorette party, taking place at a remote property owned by their now deceased parents. Beth brings along some of her raggedy besties, none of whom like Tes. The feeling is also mutual. At an obligatory stop at a quiet convenience store not far from the remote cabin, Tes has a prickly exchange with a trio of rude men, their nasty leader also claiming to be a veteran. Arriving at the cabin, Tes tersely interacts with the members of the party, wary about the neighbors, a group of men who maintain her parents’ property for them. When she overhears a suspicious conversation, Tes is alerted to something strange afoot. As night falls and the chef turned stripper begins the bawdy portion of the party's entertainment, terror descends upon the bachelorettes when a group of masked men begin to kill them off with arrows, demanding entry to the house, where something is hidden they deem valuable. Tes is forced to motivate the women and hatches a plan to kill the intruders.
Labute’s 1997 debut In the Company of Men would seem to provide a guide to decode almost all his other cinematic contributions. While his scripts tipping the balance of power towards his female characters would seem to offer more empowering portraits of patriarchal resistance, this isn’t often the case, especially in reference to something like his abysmal 2006 remake of The Wicker Man or last year’s House of Darkness. As such, Fear the Night somehow feels most similar to his oddball dark comedy Nurse Betty (2000), in which a traumatized woman is the focal point tying together the strange group of men pursuing her. As Tes, Maggie Q isn’t given a lot of room for characterization, but she’s someone who clearly hasn’t processed her own trauma and certainly isn’t allowed to in the frivolous context of a bachelorette party, where LaBute oddly paints a drastic juxtaposition between Tes and her two sisters. There’s a strange subtext suggesting heterosexual women are brainless baubles who are gleefully unaware of their surroundings, so much so the extreme violence brought upon them eventually seems inordinately self righteous.
Speaking of frivolous, there’s nothing much to the narrative trajectory, instilled with a countdown as the night turns into morning and the bodies of both victims and perpetrators pile up. There’s also little characterization for the men, who are about as one dimensional as the assailing veterans in Katie Aselton’s Black Rock (2012), and the dramatic catalyst regarding why their access to the goods hidden in the house has to take place on this one specific night needed some significant reworking, suggesting this would have played better had it not taken place during one 24 hour period. Ultimately, Maggie Q doesn’t have enough space to save Fear the Night from its B-grade trappings, while her bristly interactions with her siblings and the bachelorette attendees (both good and bad) are bordering on camp (and would have been more entertaining had LaBute cared to more articulately convey why they all seem to despise the overly capable Tes so much). On the plus side, it’s energetically paced, ripping through its meager running time like an alcoholic taking advantage of last call, and with about as predictable an outcome (including, because this is LaBute territory, a heavy-handed woman-hating sheriff played by Geoff Pierson in the film’s unnecessary finale).
★★1/2☆☆☆