Sean Parker
Back in 2020, James Villeneuve was a name I made note of. I was watching Vicious Fun on Shudder and loved every minute of it. The film starts as a single-location thriller, where an ’80s horror movie critic gets stuck in a Chinese food restaurant after hours with a group of serial killers holding a self-help meeting. Then it develops into a night of pure chaos and terror. Vicious Fun is aptly titled, and it’s a genuinely entertaining romp, matched with a story that avoids stagnation through clever pivoting and insanely great dialogue. It’s a thoroughly entertaining film that remains underrated, in my opinion, and Villeneuve’s script is a huge part of that. Now, five years since Vicious Fun, Villeneuve returns with his feature-length directorial debut, a white-knuckle horror film that is again aptly named, as I’m sure audiences will be on Pins and Needles throughout.
Riding with her friend Harold (Hell of a Summer’s Daniel Gravelle) through miles and miles of nothingness on the drive back from a collegiate biology project to her campus, Max (Scared Shitless’ Chelsea Clark) hopes the worst thing that could happen is having to deal with her off-putting professor next semester. However, after Harold picks up the shady Keith (Fear Street: Prom Queen’s Damian Romeo), a possible drug dealer, her hope for a smooth ride is dashed. The car is pulled over by an officer who is simply trying to redirect the vehicle away from an upcoming road closure. But, instead of following the officer to the highway, Harold thinks he’s playing it safe by taking the long way, that is, until they catch a flat tire outside of an illustrious estate in the middle of nowhere.
Stranded with no cell phone signal, Max decides to walk up to the property, but before she can find anyone to assist her and her friends, a car pulls up. Thinking a good Samaritan has pulled over to assist, the couple inside instead has other intentions. While this may sound like the perfect run-like-hell scenario, Max’s condition as an insulin-dependent diabetic puts a quick damper on that. As the couple begins the meticulous process of making it look as if Harold never drove by, they reveal themselves to be the homeowners. Knowing she won’t get far without insulin, Max finds herself creeping through the sadistic couple’s house in search of her medication in this tense and unnerving nail-biter.
Chelsea Clark gives a visceral performance that will leave you on the edge of your seat as Villeneuve infuses Pins and Needles with a hefty dose of what made Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe so incredibly mesmerizing. However, Pins and Needles ups the ante with villains who can see clearly, and a story developing in broad daylight. The odds are against Max as she stealthily moves between basements and closets, where the slightest sound or wrong move could have deadly implications. Clark uses all the right moves to make your heart skip beats. From her frantic energy and heavy breathing to covering her mouth on high alert, the viewer grows just as uncomfortable with Max skulking around that house as Max is, and that’s thanks in part to her villainous psycho costars, too.
Kate Corbett and Ryan McDonald are gloriously unhinged as Emily and Frank, an American Psycho-inspired couple who are interested in disrupting investment markets with the latest in the growing field of biotech. The couple rattles off acronyms and engages in tone-deaf conversations about yachts and helicopters while trying to perfect their formula for an age-defying beauty treatment with their new test subjects. The couple treats others like chattel, seeing their value only in terms of usefulness to them.
Pins and Needles’ villains may not be stock market Reaganauts of the eighties, but Villeneuve is clearly seeing some parallels between the underregulated tech industries affluent Trump supporters have made millions on and the “Greed is Good” Gordon Gekkos who made their fortunes during the Regan era. At one point, he shows Emily and Frank standing on their lawn with weapons as if to suggest the defense of their property from the people asking for help. It’s very reminiscent of the picture of a couple on their lawn with guns during the BLM protests in 2020. He also supplies the couple with the mantra that it’s burdensome not to have achieved financial success before thirty, throwing in heavy doses of hypocrisy along the way for good measure. I have been in some conversations with people exactly like this where I’ve felt trapped as well.
I’m a big fan of this style of Americana horror, showing the underbelly of the American dream. While many of these films have historically brought audiences to the suburbs or Elm St., Pins and Needles’ supremely rural American gothic takes us into a new era (or error) of the landscape. From the ’50s to the ’80s, people moved in droves from the cities to the suburbs. Now, with a housing shortage in the suburbs caused by poor planning and the heavy purchasing of real estate by investors for short-term rentals, densely populated areas are pricing people out of their homes, making rural America the next inexpensive option for development. Think it’s fiction? A one-hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old twenty-one-acre New Jersey farm has watched the surrounding area build up over the last two centuries and may beg to differ, as the owners fight eminent domain proceedings.
All of this is, of course, subtly baked into Pins and Needles’ story, supplying it with an air of Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the process. If the decay of rural neighborhoods from the 1970s is now ripe for exploitation by investors, who is scarier: Leatherface or a hedge-fund bro and his Karen wife?
There will be a need for some suspension of disbelief, as medical professionals may take issue with the excessive insulin measurements and other healthcare dynamics presented within this indie film. There are also a couple of frustrating horror-movie moments toward the end, but that only proved to me how engrossed I was in the movie while I screamed things at my television, urging Max to make clearer decisions. To say Pins and Needles left an impression is an understatement. If you can see past a few of the film’s shortcomings, a taut, pulse-pounding thriller with fantastic performances awaits. And, keep your eye out for future projects from writer-director James Villeneuve and rising star Chelsea Clark; they are names I hope we’ll be hearing more from soon.
Pins and Needles arrives on PVOD Friday, June 24.
PINS AND NEEDLES (2024) | Official Trailer – Chelsea Clark, Kate Corbett, Ryan McDonald
What should have been an uneventful ride back to campus unexpectedly becomes a nightmare as Max, a diabetic, biology grad student, is entrapped in a diabolical new-age wellness experiment. With her insulin supply dwindling, Max is forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse where she must escape at all costs or risk becoming the next test subject to extend the lives of the rich and privileged.
