Wounds is written and directed by Babal Anvari, and stars Armie Hammer as Will; a bartender who finds a phone left behind on the floor of the bar and takes it home with the hopes of discovering its rightful owner. He starts messaging the phone’s open chat, receiving distressing replies, and finds disturbing images in the phone’s photo album. When his girlfriend, Carrie, played by Dakota Johnson, urges him to call a contact on the phone, Will just may have led dark forces into their home.
I’ve liked Armie Hammer in other roles – he was one of the main reasons I decided to watch this movie on Netflix. It’s sad to say, I don’t think Hammer was the right fit for this protagonist. The movie gives us a good twenty minutes to get attached to Will, before the main scares get underway, but I never warmed to him in any meaningful way. As simple as it sounds, I never bought Armie Hammer as the bartender. He offers his friend Alicia (Zazie Beetz) and her boyfriend drinks maybe 3 times in five minutes in the opening scene; it’s not fluid and reminded me of rehearsal for a play. The character of Will could be described as charismatic and cool, but so is Armie Hammer without even trying, so it’s hard to say where the character comes in, and Hammer is left behind. It’s disappointing, because it means as Will is spiralling due to dark influences on the phone, I didn’t care as much about the main character unravelling. I think this guy was stiff for not getting nominated for Best Actor for Call Me by Your Name, but he should have steered clear of Wounds.
I thought the movie was going to pull a fast one on me and reveal that the phone was Eric’s all along. The stickers, and the kids on the background of the phone were going to be red herrings. There are apparent similarities between Will’s deteriorating behaviour and the actions of Eric (Brad William Henke), the erratic drunk from the beginning of the film. Eric encounters the kids Will has been texting too, when they make Eric phone Will to his apartment, but it’s never revealed that the kids had been targeting Eric originally, and chose to swap to Will, or not. The films scares are really disconnected and I’m not sure what we are meant to believe is going on anyway. There’s a human eye in a cockroach hole, for starters; make sense of that. By the time we get to the end and Will breaks up with his girlfriend, Carrie snarls that Will is ‘hollow’, but it’s unclear whether it is her talking or if she has become effected by the portal she’s been staring in on through her laptop; there is a previous moment where Carrie says something callous, which led me to believe she might have been possessed as well. Will leaves the room, and as he returns Carrie is now crying… did he hallucinate Carrie verbally abusing him? Will has already hallucinated once, with cockroaches in the car, and his mind could be making him think Carrie is being blunt when she’s genuinely upset. Then at the end, as Will is leaning in to eat Eric’s face, he confesses that he is hollow, but I’m not sure if that’s a revelation about his character as much as it’s the dark force taking over inside of him. It could be either, or both! Perhaps the movie is trying to be intentionally ambiguous, providing an unreliable narrator, like what we recently saw in Joker, but if so, it isn’t clear, and it isn’t intriguing in the same way. The movies’ use of cockroaches is immense, but all it did for me was remind me of Men in Black.
I also did not give a hoot about Will spending a drunken night with Alicia, especially due to the timing of it; since the kids on the phone have just freaked him out to the point of heading to the police about it, wouldn’t he want to get home to keep Carrie safe, even if their relationship is on the rocks? If Will isn’t concerned about the kids with dismembered body parts on their phones coming after him, why should I? That detour completely cut the building danger for me.
The scenes with Dakota Johnson are the movie’s best quality. The demise of the relationship between Will and Carrie is well-written and fleshed out. In the beginning, Carrie is icy towards Will, and there’s an underlying sense of mistrust, which is later justified as Will has been unfaithful. Despite Will’s efforts to keep their relationship functioning, Carrie seems to be already moving on. It is credibly due to Carrie’s scepticism of where Will got the phone that causes the movie to progress, with Will making the call. Johnson is not a favourite of mine but she makes the most of what is required of her here. After appreciating her part in Suspiria last year, maybe it’s time I get on board with her.
A couple of the images are okay too. I liked it when Carrie was put in the bathtub and all the filth poured out of her, bringing her back to sanity. It was a good idea to finish the movie with the cockroaches swarming the camera as well, but I feel like that has certainly been done before.
If you like cockroaches, this might be the movie for you, otherwise avoid. Wounds comes across as underdeveloped and uninteresting.
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