i was basically hanging on to swetalina like a koala for half the movie and destroying her hand's blood circulation by how hard i was squeezing it. it was really good, man. i haven't ever watched a horror movie in a theatre (for good reason, i am a pussy and would absolutely shit my pants without someone to hold on to) so this was a nice first experience with good friends. it's shot really well and has standout performances from the two leads. i know there's a lot of conversation around the rape allegories in reviews but i ended up interpreting it in a different way on my first watch. all the time i was just sitting with the fact that bear was dating a completely different person coz that THING was not the niki he liked. it was just impersonating whatever bear wanted it to be coz it wanted bear to love it. i keep using "it" coz i perceive the entity obsessed with bear to be different than niki, which is true coz we are shown multiple instances of niki trying to communicate with bear and claw her way out of the thing by causing grevious harm to herself. hell, she was literally begging bear to kill her to end her torment. sarah's death was expected (there was a very prominent fakeout at the party where i was bracing myself for the thing to kill sarah but ofc i knew it was gonna happen through the car window) but still very jumpscarey lol. i accidentally hid my face in the scene coz i got scared by its suddenness and missed the thing initially grabbing sarah's head and smashing it. ian was a shitty friend btw. and poor sandy the cat. umm. holy shit the cat overdosing was foreshadowing for bear's death. also bear's fate was sad. it'd've been better for him to shoot himself in finality rather than his last memory being the horror of hearing the One Wish Willow's jingle in the thing's hands. stellar movie, really. it's beautifully horrifying. you never knew what the thing was gonna do. genuinely so unsettling. especially that one scene where she reverses back weirdly while kissing bear. like literally what the fuck that scared the daylights out of me. bravo bravo. this went into my 10/10 quintessential list on letterboxd coz this experience is gonna stay with me lol. haven't had an addition to the quintessential list in a long while.
