Desperate for work so she can ensure a comfortable future for her daughter, an undocumented immigrant takes a caretaker job (through an agency that helps place people in her predicament) in the middle of nowhere for an eccentric older gentleman. Nina and her little kid Isabella have an encounter with a man in distress on the way up, her agency rep tells her to ignore it and not to get involved. Luther is hesitant to take in a mother and daughter but eventually relents when he finds out that there’s nobody else around who would miss them… I mean, take them in. Sorry. So weird they made a point of him checking on that during the initial interview. After a tour of the house where Luther talks about hunting, maintaining traditions and the kindness of trimming the herd… huh, weird they made a point of focusing on that, he mentions a festival coming up that the whole small town takes part in and Luther is excited that Nina and her kid will be able to attend. He also warns against going in the basement, insists on her drinking a special tea blend for her health, cures his own meats in a backyard shed… and there’s so many red flags less than 15 minutes in that if Nina wasn’t in the dire situation she’s in, I’d be saying she really should have grabbed her kid and ran. I mean, she still should have but I get ignoring a bunch of the obvious warning signs. A stranded motorist shows up and more stupidity performed poorly plays out. Awkward performances mingle with scene compositions that range from stale to braindead and a predictable plot helps nothing. English may not be Nina’s first language, which is never a problem, but it seems that “human” may not be part of that equation either and it leads to a performance that screams “head injury”. Luther, on the other hand, comes off like Tobin Bell if he had almost none of the talent and most of the hamminess. I guess it’s noble that all those folks in the head trauma ward got a paying gig. Solid bits of wit when it comes to ignorance may land here and there but the whole thing is like a train wreck but instead of carnage you can’t look away from, it’s just a menagerie of cringeworthy performances/filmmaking you don’t want to watch but find it hard to take your eyes off of. I’ll give it points for antlers because I always find people wearing antlers creepy as fuck… not sure why, there’s probably something repressed I may not want to shine a light on. At least the annoying racists getting up to bullshit come to messy ends. I can dig that.
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