Shudder announced that as the finale for their live Halloween programming that they would be showing a new film that wouldn’t be shown again until sometime in 2021. Speculation was all over the place with many believing it would be the Train to Busan sequel, Peninsula. We were not so lucky, although the secret film that they showed was just that.
Lucky is a weird little film. It starts with a nice loving couple enjoying their night. After they’ve gone to sleep a noise wakes May (Brea Grant who also wrote the film), who sees a man outside in their yard. She wakes her husband Ted (Druhv Uday Singh) who calmly tells her that it must be the man who comes every night to kill them. It is said so matter of factly it throws May off and it received a pretty good chuckle out of me. May and Ted eventually fight off the Man, who disappears after they look away and the couple report the case to police. May is confused, as I was but this is the point.
For whatever reason May can’t remember that she has a constant stalker or understand why no one really seems all that perplexed by this. The couple get in a fight over this and Ted exits stage left, leaving May to fend for herself against this recurrent stalker. Each night he appears, each night May fights him off. Sometimes she does so quickly, other times she gets injured and comes close to death herself. It’s all very surreal.
For the first two acts, the film is kind of fun as we watch May struggle to understand what is going on and then battle against it. But the final act tears it all down. If the first two acts are thinly veiled metaphors for the struggles and victimization of women within the current patriarchal social order and how we expect women to fight this on their own instead of together, the final act is a blunt metaphor and it doesn’t really work for the film. Yes, the final act gets the message across but in doing so it loses the thread of the narrative.
Ultimately, Lucky is fine but with a little more cohesion it could have been something more. Instead, I’m likely to just remember it as the film that wasn’t Peninsula as Shudder’s Halloween surprise.
3*
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