Sick

The blunt examination of COVID ideologies is ingenious, though difficult to fully unpack without giving away the third act, but it’s the filmmaking’s ruthlessness that’ll catch in your mind.

It takes a moment for the action to start—about 38 minutes—but once it does, this otherwise generic thriller’s flimsy relevance and unusual pacing not only seem more forgivable but maybe even sneakily clever.

For the most part, Sick is just a slickly formulaic mid-budget horror movie, well-crafted by the screenwriters and directed with style and energy by the skilled John Hyams. But the real-world wrinkles aren’t just a cynical way to make the routine more relevant. They give all the bloody murder a meaning.

Williamson knows how to write a horror script – Sick offers moderate to intense thrills delivered in a compact frame whose Covid 2020 specificity adds more to the tension than it distracts.

Sick is exceptionally paced and provides slasher thrills with breakneck intensity, but loses traction during a wobbly landing that needlessly overcomplicates an otherwise cutthroat thrill ride.

Hyams’ film doesn’t make the most of its concept but, although it’s not a particularly interesting slasher, it is an efficient one. Fans of the genre will no doubt have a little fun with it. The fun just isn’t infectious.

Whether the ideas they’re toying with here offer a booster shot of relevance to a modern slasher story is, frankly, debatable. What we can say is: congratulations on being both first out of the gate and an instant subgenre footnote.

This film is as absurd as the individualist reactions to the pandemic which it critiques. It's nothing genius, but it's an entertaining slasher that really takes us back to the early days of the pandemic, when COVID was not quite so politicized and the general response highlighted the cut-throat individualism of American society.

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Slasher-style horror movie released in 2023. Let me be frank, I opened the movie without hope, I said it's a lousy movie again, but it turned out better than I expected. But the reason for the excuse is funny. Covid and pandemic situation prevail in the movie. Starter classic slasher style. So the first victim dies within the first minutes. Then there is a pandemic situation due to Covid and two girlfriends go to a deserted lake house for quarantine. The murderer at the beginning of the movie is also coming there. The movie is better than the movie "Scream 5". There are exciting scenes. I gave the movie 1 point more because it misled me. The only thing that caught my eye was the loose clothing on the lead girl. So it draws attention when running away. He looks like a clown. There is no sex or nudity in the movie.

Making a horror film is hard. I felt like this must have been pitched as Scream in thr digital age! The beginning scenes were so silly that I thought we were watching an auteur poking fun at lesser movies, but then I realized that was actually the movie. The last time I felt this, I was watching The Omega Code which I did not know was an Evangelical-funded movie.

If someone had told me two years ago that we would reach the point of the covid slasher I would've laughed without a second thought. Today I feel like an idiot, although the results don't leave me in such a bad light after all. Nowadays horror no longer needs to shock audiences with violence or cheap scares, what these films urgently need is an identity and films like Sick are completely devoid of it.