Alive starts with an interesting premise, true to its mystery roots. Both a female and a male person wake up in a bizarre hospital without recollection of who they are and what are they doing there. To make matters worse, their doctor seems to have odd intentions about their staying at the hospital.
📋Need a quick executive summary of this review? Here you go: Alive builds good momentum as a creepy slasher mystery but does not deliver a satisfying conclusion to the arc it so neatly built. Keep reading for the detailed revision.
This premise is what drives the overall plot. Let's call both protagonists Female and Male; well, Female and Male wonder what the f has happened to them, how did they wind up in such a decrept place. As the movie progresses, we get possible hints to what could be the answers; and this crave for knowing what is going on and how will they get out of this mess is what keeps us hooked to the movie.
To add to the creepy scenario, Angus Macfadyen throws a good performance as a demented doctor. Throughout the movie, you love hating him and you want to see him suffer.
And this hate leads me to one flaw in this movie. After enduring so much, Female and Male do not take their chances in a plausible way. One scene presents a crazy-good opportunity to kill their delusional caretaker, but, for plot movement, they dismiss killing the doctor, adding to our frustration.
Female and Male grow to our liking, and we want to see them win, despite the curveball that the story keeps throwing at them, either by chance, or by their own inability to save themselves. By the middle of the movie, we get a plot twist: are they connected somehow?
This movie's cinematography and soundtrack are on par with average slasher horrors and body horror. Gore, a lot of blood, a lot of endured pain.
When we get to the final act, we are ready for some revelations, and some action. Will the movie pay off? Well, not quite, unfortunately. Through some odd twist, the final revelation is weird and out of tune with what the movie was so far. The last scene is so out of place with the movie, depicting some weird acting by Gerrick Winston and Chantal Perron, that I wonder if the same director was behind all this.
The final scene shows how Direction might either save or destroy the movie. Though the idea of the movie, once we get it, is quite interesting and could have been done right, the last moments of the movie, which shows weird tie-ins with satirical and parodical movies, do not deliver the closure we were expecting.
Alive might please genre-specific fans, but its ending did not complete the arcs of Female and Male in a pleasant way. An unfortunate conclusion to a quite interesting story.
