Oh, early security. . . Six teenage eco-activists hide at night in a huge store of household goods to hold an action in defense of animals and at the same time have fun. However, they have to defend themselves - after all, one of the guards is "going roof." . .
Not all guards are equally useful. They sit in huge rooms alone, watching video cameras, and who knows what is on their mind? The logic of compact horrors makes them ideal heroes (or antiheroes) – as in Parking or Human Centipede 2. In "Night Knead" (originally "Wake Up!"), the guard brothers are two and look exactly like Tucker and Dale from "Homicide Holiday" - one thin and tenuous, and the second - Kevin - a real formidable bear. I have to give credit to the script - the image of Kevin was not trivial. At first he elicits empathy - he has obvious problems with socialization and anger management - his lean brother is forced to pull the slob out of trouble. At the same time, Kevin is really interested only in a hobby - "primitive hunting" without firearms. The teasing of children, raids by the boss, and then the deprivation of the opportunity to go on the long-awaited hunt bring him to the limit ... and then the teenage bullies arrived. Big mistake.
Images of grief activists were less successful screenwriters (teens are traditionally played by actors of 25 years). In their group, several conflicts are outlined: a love triangle, the leader of the group does not trust the beginner, but these conflicts remain unused, and the characters, as often happens in slashers, remain extras, differing only in the order of elimination.
Shooting a thriller in a huge store is not a new idea. It is immediately clear that the authors tagged in IKEA - their store is almost the same name, and the locations in it look exactly like IKEA - mazes of imitations of furnished rooms, shelves of flat boxes ... and a lot of everything that can be used as a weapon. The authors even introduced an absurd scene where the characters, in order to save someone, are forced... to quickly assemble the “Kikeev” cabinet! What an advertisement!
Teenagers are easy prey for a raving security guard, so there is no real confrontation, and due to the age of the actors there is no feeling that the thug is hunting children. But several visual solutions in the store were successful – for example, a scene with characters doused with phosphorescent paint in pitch darkness looks like fantastic scenes in the Black Hole about night monsters. Also, the film is not shy of bloody scenes - the French here are clearly more relaxed than the Americans, so there will be a lot of blood - as well as blows with a hammer, cold weapons, a spear, a sharp stick and so on.
As a genre attraction, the film works very well, exactly following the canons and clichés of the genre. And in this case, this is a plus: in the era of postironic slouberners, this straight-forward bloody movie about aggressive boogie against millennials with smartphones is what you need!