Significant Other

You have to admire a movie that has the confidence to hold off on all of its interesting elements until more than halfway through its runtime. For the first 40 minutes, Significant Other is a completely unspectacular relationship drama that solely follows stars Maika Monroe and Jake Lacy as they go camping in some beautiful woods while having periodic B-movie scares at creepy deer and spooky sounds. I would not be surprised at all if many viewers decided to give up before anything interesting happened.

I can promise you that things DO eventually happen, and while I'm not sure the wild twists are entirely effective, it's nevertheless an interesting experiment in restraint.

Going through the process of getting to know Ruth (Monroe) and Harry (Lacy) as they drive towards their campsite is mildly interesting at best. A lot of the tension comes from the simple fact that Lacy is doing the whole smarmy, super overconfident boyfriend routine, all made even more grating by the fact that he looks alarmingly like a younger Ed Helms. Is he being sincere or is he just a typical fratty type? Either way, he's not exactly easy to root for, even though these same qualities work a little better after his character completely shifts in the second half. He's also not helped by the fact that Monroe (who was stellar in the instant classic It Follows) is very ordinary and dull. Even after things start to ramp up, her performance isn't nearly enough to help carry what is going on.

I won't get into the details of all the twists that keep coming throughout the second half, but even though they are surprising enough to keep you watching, they ultimately aren't anything more than that. A late play at emotional resonance in which a climactic speech tries to give everything some kind of thematic weight falls incredibly flat, and you're left feeling nothing more than the equivalent of a shrug. Even the ending hints at a sequel or at least off-screen developments that would potentially be more interesting than what we got here.

Writers/directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen excel on a technical level, giving us gorgeous visuals of stunning state parks in Oregon and a few neat visual transitions between scenes; although maybe some of the credit there should also be directed towards cinematographer Matt Mitchell. This thing at least looks and feels like an expensive, well-polished production.

At the end of the day, it's a fairly pedestrian horror/thriller with some twists that are intriguing due to their off-the-wall nature, but nothing that makes you feel like sitting through an initial 40 minutes of tedium was worth it.