By: Kori Miller

Thrillers, albeit difficult to pull off, are probably one of the most diverse genres practiced in film. They’re usually pretty straightforward; keeping you on the edge of your seat down until the final seconds of the satisfying conclusion. They’re also probably the most popular genre to date. This month’s flavor of the week has been Don’t Tell a Soul, a film with an all-star cast that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Matt and Joey are brothers robbing a tented house, making out with over $12,000 in cash. Although they manage to escape, the only witness, a security guard that goes by Hamby, ends up falling into an abandoned well in the midst of chasing them. The pair of boys have to make an important decision; leave the man to die and keep the cash, or save the life of someone potentially innocent. 

It’s hard to find a place to begin with this dumpster fire of a “psychological” thriller. When you read the cast list, there’s a lot to expect considering it is composed exclusively of very capable actors. However, the writing and motivations for the characters are so skewed that even the best of the best would seem as bland as a bowl of chowder. It’s almost embarrassing. It’s the kind of film you have to completely turn your mind off to enjoy, as one split second of complex thought will have you second-guessing

what it is you’re even watching. We’re meant to believe not a single character in this film owns a cell phone, none of them consider the legal repercussions of a single decision they make, and most of all, no one has a brain in their skull. It’s intensely distracting for the kind of film you’re supposed to sit around and think about. The issue with this one is that the longer you think about it, it ages like a slab of ham left out in the sun.

If you couldn’t already tell, this film is a complete pass. Without a second of its runtime being even minorly worthwhile, you’d likely find more entertainment in watching paint dry. It falls into the same tropes we’ve all seen a million times, from the brother dynamic to the ‘x is actually a serial killer’. It’s a tired script that should have been recycled the second someone sat down to write it, and I pity the stain this will leave on the filmography of everyone involved.

Don’t Tell a Soul currently holds a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.9/10 on IMDB.