Synopsis:
Will this nightmare ever end?
It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend—the venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air, and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends finally having the big wedding they always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seeing her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.
Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question if it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.
Review:
There’s a whole lot that can go wrong on the big day. The dress could snag, the DJ could miss the mark, awkward speeches, poorly thought-out seating plans, dry chicken- I definitely don’t need to tell you just how pear-shaped things can get if you’ve watched “Married At First Sight”- particularly the Australian one, but I digress. All this to say that in Rachel Harrison’s latest, a brain-frazzling, time-looping wedding slasher for fans of “Happy Death Day,” and Chuck Tingle, things go fatally wrong again and again and again. Harrison has given us werewolves and witches, vampires, a satanic cult and most recently a haunted house, and whilst her latest release of course has her signature extraordinary female protagonist at its helm, it nods at various horror tropes, some well established, some batshit fucking insane, each executed beautifully. A reminder to look after, trust, and value ourselves, and that maybe the last wedding you attended (assuming everybody survived it) wasn’t all that bad, this one is out September 8th from Berkley in the US and Titan in the UK, I do believe the latter with a lovely spredge.
We follow Willa Sullivan, a whiskey-sour-loving recently ex-fiance, who can think of about 100 places she would rather be than a wedding. But she has to show up for her friend, even though her ex Ravi is there too, and even though he’s brought a date along. With the sticky addition of having a tinned margherita spilled on her dress, it’s safe to say that the day is turning out to be pretty abysmal, until she meets Danny. They get to talking and seem to have been charmed by one another, things are looking up… until the massacre. Damn. And she has to do it all over again tomorrow today.
I imagine most of us know what it is like to get comfortable, close our eyes, only to get a cold shock from the wave of embarrassing things that occurred that day washing over us. Things we should have said or done differently, perhaps even things completely beyond our control, things we wish we could go back and change, I chipped my front tooth on a beer bottle this week- the front one. BUT, as Willa would tell you, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be apparently. She’s a great protagonist, in a tough spot when we meet her, and in a tougher one still when she’s already been brutally murdered multiple times- which is how that iteration of the day ends. More unfortunately still for Willa, the day stuck on repeat happens to be a wedding day, which she personally finds to be particularly painful, on top of the usual broad smiles and firm handshaking that we all feel obligated to offer. To summarise then, Willa is awesome, the plot and the backdrop, also top tier, just not for her.
Now then, a note to self here (just in case) is that generally time loops require those stuck in them to do something different, to not make that same mistake again and again, and of course, that same outlook can be applied to any rut that we happen to be stuck in, time and space related or otherwise. Harrison’s central message, or rather the one that I drew from “Kiss Slay Replay,” is just that. In Willa’s case of course, the solution, really, is to take it a little easier on herself, stop with the what-ifs, give herself some love and credit where it’s due. Not to say of course, that that’s an easy feat, or that we aren’t allowed to wobble, and be the imperfect people that we most certainly all are, simply that to be just that is perfectly alright.
Beyond masterful and thoroughly entertaining, Harrison’s take on the slasher is truly quality. It takes the best bits, the various grisly set-piece deaths, the masked killer (and then some) and even a splash of haunted Summer-camp lore, a nice touch with a sci-fi-ish twist. All of these chain-saw-revving, near- essential elements are there, and they’re done extraordinarily well, but then we’re given so much more on top of that- a final girl who dies repeatedly, impactful commentary, a very nuanced romantic dynamic- fucking quantum physics. Good show.
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