Mehnificent

What we have in Until Dawn is less a horror film than a breathless round of charades performed at the world’s noisiest sleepover—everyone putting on their most rubbery "terrified" faces but nobody remembering quite what play they’re in. The filmmakers, with the game’s title in one hand and an empty grab bag of horror clichés in the other, seem to have asked themselves, “Should we tell the story so many cared about?”—and then tossed the question straight down the mineshaft.

If “Inside Man: Most Wanted” were a painting, you’d see the fingerprints of more talented artists beneath a slapdash coat of knockoff red—Money Heist jumpsuits, borrowed swagger, and all the desperation of a studio aching to wring one more drop from a well gone dry. What’s most astonishing is how a sequel about robbing the Federal Reserve manages to steal absolutely nothing from the intelligence, suspense, or style of Spike Lee’s superb original.

As directors go, David Mackenzie always struck me as someone who refused to drift through genre on autopilot. Hell or High Water was a jolt to the “modern Western” in the way an electric current perks up a tired body—full of sunbaked grit and genuine desperation. So it’s almost a perverse accomplishment that Relay, despite carrying all the trappings of a high-concept, glossy paranoia thriller, manages to take the zeitgeist by the throat and promptly doze off. You can practically hear the film’s pulse rate dropping as the credits roll.

When the news broke that Spike Lee and Denzel Washington were reuniting, I imagine half of New York felt that pulse of anticipation: the sort of glee you reserve for a holiday, or spotting Brando’s name in a cast list again. What could go wrong with this pairing? Everything, it turns out—at least, in that most poignant way of contemporary American filmmaking, where the result is less artistic combustion and more accidental kitchen sink fire.

It’s almost a shame, watching Untamed, to see how little faith the show has in the very wilderness it fetishizes. From its opening moments—where a body falls off El Capitan, landing with the grace of a screenwriter’s design rather than the force of gravity—we are meant to believe we’re entering that coveted realm: the prestige procedural, taut with secrets and wound as tightly as a coil of survival rope. And yet, by episode two—somewhere between the first heavy downpour (that leaves nary a footprint erased) and the second miraculous rescue in a park the size of Luxembourg—the spell begins to lift and what’s left is a potboiler searching for a kettle.

The date on which Exterritorial rolled out on Netflix is not likely to be emblazoned on the calendars of film lovers, unless, perhaps, as a cautionary tale for aspiring directors on how a minor thrill premise can be spun into an inextricable web of misdirection, empty conspiracy, and conspicuous plot-fumbling. If Christian Zübert set out to make a woman-on-the-brink action yarn about the delirium of maternal loss and the cruel machinery of power, what we get instead is a would-be mystery that squanders its own slender promise, often wandering the consulate’s echoing corridors with as little purpose (and with as much head-scratching immunity to security) as its protagonist.