This excursion into psychological horror is tiresome and repetitive, not to mention unappealingly disorientating.
Death fo Me is Vietnamese/American actress Maggie Q’s second exotic location feature this year after the fatuous Fantasy Island, now in the small South Pacific Thailand Island is her Christine on holiday with hubby travel writer and photographer Neil (Luke Hemsworth, older brother of Chris and Lian).
At the end of their colorful, quaint time they wake up in their rental bloodied and bruised with no recollection of what happened the night before. Thus, they have to piece together what happened from the footage on Neil’s digital camera which appears to have recorded horrific acts by him to his wife.
It also happens that a terrible storm is about to reach the island, through locals report nothing like it has happened in two centuries. Preparations for a festival they aren’t privy too are going on. Mask-wearing kids are waving streamers and a doll has quite a resemblance to Christine.
Clarity is in extreme short supply in what amounts to an enervating, un-involving variation on pictures like the first Wicker Man and the more recent Midsommar. Because vicious and weird rituals make life rather unpleasant for these urban tourist protagonists. And, in the case of Christine, how the hallucinatory coincides with reality makes for detrimental surreal irrationality is there a realization of where this couple originated and if they will escape in one piece?
Helmsman Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III, IV) can’t do much with the doubt and mystery inherent in the plotting by scribes Ari Margolis, James Morley III, and David Tish as a past is probed and a denouement turns quite febrile, nevertheless, his connection with the torture-port franchise yields dividends of shocking, disemboweling value. Just a lurid part of a chintzy, inconclusive exploitative assault on your mind and senses that wreaks of stale conventionality.