Review: “Till Death”

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love generally does not involve chaining yourself to your spouse in a complicated murder-suicide plot involving her lover and the convict who attempted to stab her to death several years ago.

I have gone on record over the years, while participating in 31 Movies for 31 Days, as a Stephen King fan. Yet I have never engaged with what is one of his more highly regarded works, both in print and screen adaptation. Gerald’s Game involves a woman who is tied to a bed as part of some marital sex play, when her husband dies and leaves her trapped there. What follows, as I understand it, is a horror that is partially physical, but more so emotional and psychological. I can’t say for sure, since I haven’t read/seen it, but I imagine that King explores the concept of marriage, the act of tethering yourself to another person in so many ways, and mirrors the protagonist’s situation thematically with that exploration. I also imagine that Gerald’s Game was in some significant way an inspiration to the makers of Till Death, the recently released Megan Fox horror vehicle in which a terrible husband handcuffs himself to his sleeping wife and then blows his brains out when she wakes up. Its gruesome stuff, certainly ripe for the same type of thematic consideration that I have blindly ascribed to King. Yet, Till Death has nothing to say about the institution of marriage, nothing to say about anything, really. It is a slickly crafted thriller with absolutely zilch below the surface.

Fox starts the movie sleep-walking through a performance that I found almost laughably bad, until I considered that she was perhaps playing up the fact that her character is sleep-walking through her relationship. If that’s true, then it isn’t a very successful approach, but it is the most clever choice in a film that seems to have an aversion to digging deep. When her one-dimensional husband, a rich, philandering District Attorney, sets his elaborate plan in to motion with his suicide, Fox transitions immediately into her role as a plucky heroine, sparing not even a moment of horror or disgust or psychological torment for the horrific, disgusting, psychologically tortuous situation that she finds herself in. The movie skips the part that should be the movie, in other words, failing to examine these characters in any capacity. Were they in love once? Why were they together? Did something happen to force them apart, or did their relationship curdle over time? We know that they were cheating on each other, but that is simply presented as fact without any understanding of the why. In reality, cheating is typically a symptom of a more deeply rooted issue, but nobody involved with this movie has time for looking at the issues underneath this tragic couple’s failed marriage.

To Fox’s credit, she fairs much better in the survivor role, and she is easy to root for. The mechanics of the cat-and-mouse game that her husband set up before his demise are handled well, and moment-to-moment it isn’t hard to get caught up in the proceedings. Yet I can’t help but pine for something, anything, that would have helped me care about Fox and her situation beyond the simple fact that of course you would sympathize with anyone in that predicament. Till Death wasn’t actively bad at anything it attempted to do, it just attempted to do so little that I’m sure I’ll forget about it by the time Halloween rolls around later this week.

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