In general, I consider anachronisms and other goofs a source of trivial amusement, not negative criticism. SICK's entire raison d'etre, however, is to be "a slasher movie about the height of the covid pandemic," so it seems a bit more essential that it actually get those details right. Without its commentary on covid paranoia, this movie would just be a very hollow, cliche, and unrealistic slasher film. Yet this "period film" does such a bad job of historical accuracy despite being made in such close proximity to the era it's trying to reflect. Years from now, people will watch this movie and assume that it somewhat accurately reflects the atmosphere of spring 2020. Obviously, they will know this satirical thriller is not a "historical document," but that won't stop scholars of the future from falsely assuming that its depiction of grocery store shopping, etc., is realistic. It is not.
In 2020, our routines so rapidly shifted from unprecedented to urgently necessary to obsolete that it's easy to forget exactly what we were doing during any particular snapshot in time. This film blurs those changes together in a sloppy way resulting in plot holes. In the first week of April, people were still cobbling together what they could to make masks. I, who very much took covid seriously from the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, would have still been wearing a combination of an old disposable painting mask and a bandana. The medical facemasks ubiquitously seen in the film took longer to enter widespread use, nor do I think they were ever so consistently and appropriately worn even in the most rigidly controlled environments, where you would still expect to see at least one person wearing a mask loosely hanging below the nose. This inaccuracy immediately made the first sequence difficult to believe for me, which was additionally complicated by the fact that when the character's TV turns onto a live newscast, it says 5:03pm despite it being full on nighttime from the start of the film, an impossibility anywhere in the United States in the first week of April. Later in the film, we see covid rapid tests that didn't even exist until months later, being used in a manner that isn't realistic to produce results that make no sense given the timeline of exposure being discussed. (These last details could be explained as character errors, but still.)
All of these mistakes could be forgiven if the film otherwise provided a trenchant examination of our pandemic-era mindset. Unfortunately, it does not. The final act yields some darkly humorous conflict that I won't spoil here, but otherwise this movie does not resemble anything at all the experience and horror of the disruptions and death tolls of 2020. In fact, this movie seems like it was made by someone decades in the future making a best guess about what covid was like. There's no actual insight to be found.
On top of that, the film is overall just hard to swallow. The performances are all questionable, and the screenplay is absurd. There's one random scene about an urban legend in which one character randomly cites the Folklore Index off the top of her head--a scene which I suppose was meant to provide some realism and character depth since it adds nothing to the themes of the film, yet which fails to do even that because of how unrealistically it's all delivered. Characters who should be dead miraculously aren't. Characters who should be afraid and trying to survive instead do completely unlikely things. This whole movie is a mess.
I was disappointed by director John Hyams's previous horror film, ALONE (2020), but thought that he at least had potential. In that film, after all, the behaviors of the killer and the would-be victim are refreshingly realistic and unpredictable despite some other glaring plot holes and deficiencies. Unfortunately, this film makes me lose all interest in seeing what Hyams has to offer in the future.
In 2020, our routines so rapidly shifted from unprecedented to urgently necessary to obsolete that it's easy to forget exactly what we were doing during any particular snapshot in time. This film blurs those changes together in a sloppy way resulting in plot holes. In the first week of April, people were still cobbling together what they could to make masks. I, who very much took covid seriously from the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, would have still been wearing a combination of an old disposable painting mask and a bandana. The medical facemasks ubiquitously seen in the film took longer to enter widespread use, nor do I think they were ever so consistently and appropriately worn even in the most rigidly controlled environments, where you would still expect to see at least one person wearing a mask loosely hanging below the nose. This inaccuracy immediately made the first sequence difficult to believe for me, which was additionally complicated by the fact that when the character's TV turns onto a live newscast, it says 5:03pm despite it being full on nighttime from the start of the film, an impossibility anywhere in the United States in the first week of April. Later in the film, we see covid rapid tests that didn't even exist until months later, being used in a manner that isn't realistic to produce results that make no sense given the timeline of exposure being discussed. (These last details could be explained as character errors, but still.)
All of these mistakes could be forgiven if the film otherwise provided a trenchant examination of our pandemic-era mindset. Unfortunately, it does not. The final act yields some darkly humorous conflict that I won't spoil here, but otherwise this movie does not resemble anything at all the experience and horror of the disruptions and death tolls of 2020. In fact, this movie seems like it was made by someone decades in the future making a best guess about what covid was like. There's no actual insight to be found.
On top of that, the film is overall just hard to swallow. The performances are all questionable, and the screenplay is absurd. There's one random scene about an urban legend in which one character randomly cites the Folklore Index off the top of her head--a scene which I suppose was meant to provide some realism and character depth since it adds nothing to the themes of the film, yet which fails to do even that because of how unrealistically it's all delivered. Characters who should be dead miraculously aren't. Characters who should be afraid and trying to survive instead do completely unlikely things. This whole movie is a mess.
I was disappointed by director John Hyams's previous horror film, ALONE (2020), but thought that he at least had potential. In that film, after all, the behaviors of the killer and the would-be victim are refreshingly realistic and unpredictable despite some other glaring plot holes and deficiencies. Unfortunately, this film makes me lose all interest in seeing what Hyams has to offer in the future.