Before we discuss Follow Her, we have to talk about its screenwriter and lead actress, Dani Barker. You’re less likely to have heard of her from her credits (The Scarehouse, anyone?) than you are her YouTube documentary series, Starvival. As a struggling actress in NYC across its two seasons, she answered oddball audition ads, recording the suspicious encounters — from skeevy to phony, like being tickled for an hour — via hidden camera to warn fellow women and, yes, to get her name out there.

Now, in Follow Her, Barker plays Jess, a fictionalized version of herself. Jess does the same undercover work for the cash and the likes, all while Dad implores her to get a “real” job. While I find the Barker of yesteryear’s Starvival cloying, the Barker of Follow Her has gifted her talents quite the showcase. Directed by Sylvia Caminer (the Rick Springfield documentary An Affair of the Heart), the movie stands tall on its own merits, but is even more interesting once you know about its real-life origins.

After responding to an ad seeking an “attractive female writer” to help finish an erotic thriller script, Jess realizes she may have crossed a line in her quest for influencer infamy. After all, the guy (Luke Cook, TV’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) wants to meet in an uncrowded park and invites her to his remote barn. Despite all the red flags unfurled, she accepts, and most of Follow Her depicts the evening — perhaps her last — as it unfolds.

Although Barker gives a terrific performance, her script impresses most. To her immense credit, I wasn’t always sure what was on the up and up. The plot is so well-structured, I kept wondering whether the story would end up at Door A or Door B, only to arrive at a third option I hadn’t considered. Cook’s intensity matches Barker’s vulnerability as their characters play games both psychological and physical. With so much of it occurring in a single location among two people, the picture exudes a refreshing degree of intimacy, almost as if presented for the stage. It may sound like overpraise, but I sensed some Deathtrap vibes for the entirety of the second act; for this stretch, Ira Levin might be, if not proud, at least a smidge jealous. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Based on a 2001 British made-for-TV movie, Danny Boyle’s Trance casts X-Men: First Class’ James McAvoy (presumably standing in for Ewan McGregor) as Simon, an art auctioneer who becomes a media hero for foiling the heist of an über-valuable painting, yet pays the price when the would-be thief, Franck (Vincent Cassel, Jason Bourne), comes looking for it.

Trouble is, the knock to the noggin Franck gives Simon during the fray results in a bout of amnesia. To jog the priceless artwork’s location from the recesses of Simon’s mind, Franck sends him to a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson, Sin City).

From then on, viewers can question how much of what Boyle shows you can be trusted, as fragments of their hypnotizing sessions bleed into reality, and vice versa. While some may call this approach a mind-fuck, Trance emerges as too much of a mess to earn that badge.

Boyle sandwiched this baby in between his two-year planning stint as artistic director for the 2012 Olympics in London, and it shows. Whereas every twist and turn and layer of Christopher Nolan’s then-recent Inception felt meticulously graphed and charted and calculated, Trance feels as if its script pages were thrown into the air, and whatever Boyle caught, he shot and edited in that order.

The result is minor Boyle (as opposed to the major likes of Trainspotting). I admire sequences of the film while being somewhat cold on it as a whole. The theatricality of certain scenes is one plus, bearing influence of Boyle’s other Olympics side project, a UK stage production of a radically rebuilt Frankenstein. I think in particular of a scene where Simon hears Franck and his goons plotting against him in a loft above; he and we see the bad guys only as larger-than-life silhouettes amid butterscotch-colored light — a gorgeously structured image in a movie teeming with ugly deeds.

At least one of those scenes springs with a smidgen of goodwill, but it’s an unintended howler. I won’t spoil it, but you’ll know it when you see it. Or hear it, rather — just listen for the sound of an electric razor buzzing to life.

Art and artifice are Boyle’s ultimate themes, and he joyously maneuvers his characters so we’re constantly wondering, “Who’s manipulating whom?” The answer is that Boyle is manipulating his audience, but not skillfully enough that most viewers will be in the mood to be shifted and shoved. Trance is too slick and too empty for its own good. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Nefarious sells itself as a demonic-possession horror thriller. However, like Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas presenting as a family comedy, only to reveal itself as a two-person sermon on evangelical Christianity, so is Nefarious. Thou shall not bear false witness and all …

Serial killer Edward Wayne Brady (Sean Patrick Flanery, Saw 3D) is hours away from a blind date with the electric chair. Arriving at the prison, Dr. Martin (Jordan Belfi, Surrogates) is assigned to give Brady a psych evaluation, because the law states if he is insane, he cannot be executed. Seems like a big ol’ box that could’ve been checked anytime before the felon’s last day on earth, but just go with it.

Right away, Brady tells “ignorant sack of meat” Dr. Martin four incredibly bonkers things:
1. He wants to be executed.
2. But he can’t be killed.
3. Because he’s the devil.
4. Furthermore, the doc will commit three murders before the night’s through.

That’s a terrific setup, full of story possibilities. Instead, Brady and Martin sit and debate theology for an hour, with only the occasional potty, phone and/or smoke break for the doc. Brady not only works at convincing Martin of supernatural evil, but tries to get Martin to let the satanic spirit inhabit him and write the “dark gospel.” Their elongated conversation entails the kind of philosophical blabbering and muddy analogies one witnesses through clips of fundamentalist preachers at the pulpit or from the mentally ill on street corners, both using a ton of words to talk ’round and ’round the same circle.

I bear no built-in opposition to faith-based films … when they function as a movie first and impart a lesson second. Good examples of this can be found in the feature adaptations of Ted Dekker’s House and Thr3e (not to mention Dekker’s novels themselves). His stories are constructed with propulsive suspense, and viewers leave with a clear understanding of his message and beliefs without feeling like their head was held under bathwater by someone shouting demands for their repentance. (Another? William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. No, really.)

Shot in Oklahoma, Nefarious comes from Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, who have found box-office riches with God’s Not Dead, God’s Not Dead 2, God’s Not Dead: We the People and — eventually, I presume — Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, God, Still Not Dead. While I haven’t seen any of those, I can say Nefarious’ preaching-to-the-choir moralizing struck me in an off-putting way I couldn’t put my finger on. Afterward (via Google, as the screener had no credits), I understood why: It’s based on a book by Steve Deace, the conservative talk show host, college dropout and election denier who rallies against “COVID-19 tyranny” and pronouns — the kind of hateful, ignorant, boogeyman politics that unfortunately seep into “the church” these days.

Speaking of fire and brimstone, Flanery admirably devotes his blinking, twitchy, stammering all to his performance. While he obviously has the showier part, he wipes the acting floor with Belfi, who at times seems to be impersonating Ben Stiller impersonating Tom Cruise, but seriously. Rounding out the cast is Deace’s boss, inflammatory, fact-bending conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, playing himself. Judging from Beck’s extended, last-scene cameo to essentially plug Deace’s novel, the sartorial choices of multishirted serpent Steve Bannon have rubbed off on him, because I counted no fewer than four layers covering his torso. —Rod Lott

Opens in theaters April 14.

With the Ocean’s Eleven franchise long folded, Scott Caan isn’t getting the calls from Hollywood he used to (and deserves), so he’s doing something about it. In One Day as a Lion, he’s written himself a meaty part as a man so desperate to save his teenaged child from a life behind bars, he’s willing to murder a stranger. Caan’s taken the word-processor route thrice before; the difference here is he’s ceded the director’s chair to someone else: John Swab, the on-the-rise filmmaker behind 2022’s impressive sex-worker thriller Candy Land (which gets a visual and an aural Easter egg).

Caan’s cash-strapped Jackie Powers has three days to hire a lawyer for his wrongly arrested son’s juvenile detention hearing. Luckily (?), a local “degenerate cowboy” (J.K. Simmons, Spider-Man) has gambled himself into $100,000 debt to an Oklahoma crime lord (Frank Grillo, The Purge: Anarchy), so Jackie reluctantly agrees to commit the hit. He fails, spectacularly, accidentally killing a bystander in the process. This sends Jackie with nowhere to go but on the run, kidnapping the lone witness, Lola (Marianne Rendón, Charlie Says).

Did I mention this is largely played for laughs? And would you believe it largely works? (Unmemorable and potentially problematic title notwithstanding.)

Looking more and more like his father by the day, Caan is gracious and likable, despite shooting that innocent man to death in the opening scene. (It helps you never see the victim once he takes the bullet — outta sight, outta mind, right?) However skewed Jackie’s moral code may be, he at least tries to do the right thing, thereby earning the audiences’ goodwill. At his side, not always willingly, Rendón’s dry, droll waitress gets the Lion’s share of the best lines. Where the pair ends up isn’t warranted, in part because the ending is so abrupt and anti-climactic, it feels like a penultimate scene that somehow got freeze-framed. Cue credits!

With a mix of actors known and not, the cast is solid. Brief bits by Virginia Madsen and Taryn Manning as, respectively, Lola’s mom and Jackie’s ex-wife, enliven an already fun film. It almost goes without saying Simmons is never not terrific. Shot in Swab’s Sooner State hometown of Tulsa and surrounding small towns, A Lion for a Day aptly uses its setting to serve the story, and the orange-and-yellow saturation of scenes help viewers feel Oklahoma’s oppressive summer heat.

Those triple-digit degrees are brutal, trust me. They’re to blame for Sylvester Stallone’s Tulsa King TV series retreating to L.A. for season 2. Come to think of it, A Lion for a Day’s tale of cowboys and criminals shares so much DNA, it could be a backdoor pilot for a secondary Tulsa King character’s spin-off. That’s not a knock; it’s a recommendation. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Single mom Karen has a new gig as a factory’s night-shift custodian. Day 1 is a doozy — and not because she has to scrub toilets. Rather, the warehouse is infiltrated by a few Halloween-masked men who want to punch her clock for good. You probably guessed as much from the film’s title, Hunt Her, Kill Her. I presume the tweak of the military term “hunter-killer” is intentional, as these guys clearly are on a mission; the reason, simple to suss out.

Played by Natalie Terrazzino in her first feature credit, Karen is not the most relatable protagonist. Then again, co-directors Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen (Five Across the Eyes) didn’t construct the movie for depth. A simple stalking exercise, the well-shot Hunt Her, Kill Her would work better if the warehouse were more labyrinthian or better spatially established to liven the routine. I’m certain it’d be tiring to chase or be chased by someone for an hour, but now I know it can be tiring to watch, too. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.