You're Next (2011)
Director: Adam Wingard
The super-rich Davisons are having a get-together for the first time in years at a remote family-owned mansion. Patriarch Paul has his favourites, but none of his children get along. One of his sons, Felix, brings girlfriend Erin to meet everyone for the first time. Nobody knows that a gang of masked intruders have just killed a couple in a nearby house and it looks like the Davison family are next.
I enjoyed this, but it is bleak, mainly because everyone apart from Erin, our heroine, is an awful person. Her secret ability to adapt and survive in the face of attack is surprising, then funny, and eventually unnerving as she brutally dispatches people with a variety of unlikely weapons.
It has notes from Home Alone, but I was more struck by its impact on films that came later, like Ready or Not, and 2022’s version of Scream. Is this the beginning of the trend towards final girls becoming as violent as their attackers?