★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Craig Ouellette
Rural horror and social issues meld in director Craig Ouellette’s gruesome fear-fare feature Straight on Till Morning.
Director Craig Ouellette’s Straight on Till Morning is a rural-set shocker in the grand tradition of films that owe much to the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it stands out from the pack with its very current take on how far some people — obviously American, in this case — might go with their ultraconservative values versus those whose search for individual freedoms clash mightily with those viewpoints.
The film begins in 1980, when young newlywed couple Rubin Robinson (James Simenc) and his pregnant bride Lilly (Katie Peabody) suffer a tragic car accident. It then jumps to 2009, when the rest of the story is set, as rock musician Dani Dupree (Kelsey Christian) hits the road from Maine to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams of becoming a famous star. At a small-town Illinois diner, she persuades waitress Kaitlin Sanbourne (Bonnie Jean Tyer) to ditch her seemingly abusive husband Darrel Jenkins (Travis Lincoln Cox) to join her on her journey, which finds the two women becoming lovers.
Unfortunately for the pair, the Robinsons — now portrayed by Bill Hengstenberg as Rubin and Maria Olsen as Lilly — survived their car accident and are seeking a bride for their hulking, masked son Virgil (Michael Gmur). Law enforcement officer Rubin kidnaps them, and the ultra-religious Rubin and Lilly put the young women through hell as they prepare to make one of them Virgil’s new wife.
Ouellette, who cowrote the screenplay with Neal McLaughlin, crafts a harrowing, violent slice of fear fare that delivers the gruesome, gory goods while keeping a somewhat unexpected subject in play throughout: love. New lovers Dani and Kaitlin are helping each other and making sacrifices for each other out of love, while the Robinson parents are doing what they do out of love for their son. While addressing diverse values and focusing on its message of love, Ouellette never strays from Straight on Till Morning being a horror movie, and a highly suspenseful, violent nailbiter of one, at that.
Splendidly helmed, written, acted, shot, and scored, Straight on Till Morning will give viewers much to discuss afterward, about both its excellence as a fright-fare film and its social themes.
Review by Joseph Perry
Straight on Till Morning screened as part of FilmQuest, which ran October 24–November 2, 2024, in Provo, Utah.
