Don’t movecurrently one of Top 10 movies on Netflixhas a brilliant premise for a thriller: a lonely woman in an isolated area meets a seemingly friendly man who turns out to be a psychotic killer and injects her with a paralyzing agent that will gradually (and temporarily) take away her physique. faculties, giving him terrifying control over his body. Now she only has a few minutes to do whatever she can to escape him before the medicine takes effect – and/or buy time until the medicine wears off.

As exciting as that sounds, it can also ring with familiarity, in several ways: because women in genre films so often encounter seemingly friendly guys who turn out to be malevolent after 12 minutes; because the Crank the films also use the corporeal form of a ticking clock that sends their hero on a desperate mission; because the title Don’t move it looks a lot like Don’t breatheanother lockdown thriller directed by Sam Raimi, who also produced this one; and because Don’t move was named the directing team of Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, recalling how the two-man team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods also wrote the original, on an intimate scale. Quiet place and directed the upcoming small-cast thriller Heretic.

But in addition, Don’t move This may sound familiar, because since the streaming boom, there have been plenty of small-cast, isolated-location thrillers in which a woman must think fast and act faster to get out of danger. The closest to this one is probably Alonein which a woman is stalked on the highway and eventually chased through the woods, much like what happens in Don’t move (there is even a knockout drug), but in a different order. There are many others, however, that resemble spiritual companions, even if the details are very different: Netflix also created Oxygena science fiction thriller about a woman trapped in a cryogenic chamber with a lack of oxygen. Hulu has become a major provider of this subgenre with My other halfa woody sci-fi film with an alien invasion twist on a domestic thriller; Nobody will save youanother close POV alien invasion film with the added trick of remaining dialogue-free throughout the film; And No way outwhere a woman stuck at a rest stop stumbles upon a kidnapping plot.

Not all of these films are exactly the same. All are at least entertaining, which is the bar Don’t move erase; some of them are of excellent quality, such as Alone. But still: that’s a lot of mainstream films that fall somewhere between Gravity and a clean slasher film, right? And Gravity was released over ten years ago; why do these movies feel like this is the biggest sensation of 2019?

Part of it, of course, is purely practical. None of these films could have cost this much to make. Don’t move has about three major speaking roles, a handful of single-scene characters, and a lot of wood. It’s about the size of its various brothers; Nobody will save you has some additional locations, No way out has a larger cast, but these are all films that ultimately seem modest in their goals. They also make sense as streaming projects. Direct-to-streaming films often fail, either because they fit too comfortably into the TV movie paradigm or because they fit poorly alongside true big-screen blockbusters – like “big” compressed films and algorithmized in your home theater. But it’s entirely possible for films like Oxygen Or Don’t move to benefit from the intimacy of the small screen while looking refined enough to pass for a “real” film. Friday night thrillers aimed at audiences who can’t necessarily hire a babysitter every time they want to watch a new movie are a perfect use for streaming originals.

But there’s another reason why these films seem particularly appropriate for the streaming age: They all have an isolationist streak. This is not to say that they advocate avoiding human interaction; many of them, like Don’t movehave a sequence in which a stranger turns out to be not a surprise threat but genuine kindness – although you can often guess what happens to these helpful strangers in the end. Often, the main character has become isolated because of some sort of trauma: the Gravity-like the loss of a child Don’t move; the loss of a spouse by suicide Alone; the death of a friend Nobody will save you. Then the unexpected confrontation places them in a fight for their lives, surpassing numbness or despair, forcing their survival instincts to kick in.

But this fight takes place in particular in their isolation. It has to be; that’s the thing. But as elemental and satisfying as that formula is, there’s also something strangely neat about it, a sharpness and clarity that can — at times — seem reductive of the experiences of grief they often attempt to describe. Perhaps it is precisely this: the deaths, in these constructions, are so compartmentalized, included in the narrative to be tastefully revealed at the right time, then pushed to the back of the mind when the thrills take hold, and maybe brought back for a while. a cruel taunt or a last-minute moment of inspiration, all of which feel like boxes to be checked on a screenwriter’s blueprint.

These films are also particularly readable as pandemic projects, of course, both in the practicality of COVID-facing productions (which must have seemed appealing in the early 2020s, as filmmakers slowly and cautiously returned to work) and in their eventual consumption from sofas, as a viable alternative to the outdoor cinema sessions that we have desperately needed for several years. There’s nothing wrong with any of this; it’s pretty cool, actually, to see a whole class of modest, largely well-crafted thrillers emerge from technical and social limitations. But after several years, the constraints begin to seem more obligatory than intelligent, more soothing than stimulating. M. Night Shyalaman has stuck to smaller-scale thrillers during his self-financing era, and they don’t feel as canned. Look Trapa film that shifts confinement, in a counter-intuitive but clever way, into a massive concert attended by thousands, mixing parental anxiety and perverse identification with its villainous protagonist.

Don’t moveon the other hand, does not contain any particular ideas about the mourning process; it’s easy to imagine, with the vagueness of its details (like many supposedly parent-centric films, it doesn’t even seem sure of the supposed age of its main child), that it might be actively irritating for a grieving person. mother. The challenge of the subgenre — the terrifying imperative to fight for yourself, or else — has transformed into a kind of assurance that you can solve anything with the right resilience. Watch too many of these engaging, stripped-down thrillers, and you start to see pain and terror reduced to comfort and the repetition of a metronomic rhythm.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts on www.alcoolsport.comAlso.

Stream Don’t Move on Netflix