Review: To Your Last Death (2019)

 To Your Last Death (2019)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

The animated horror film To Your Last Death is not the kind of movie I normally see. It felt like a brutal graphic novel come to life with its exceptional animation, its dark and twisting storyline, a great cast of cult actors and newcomers doing the voice work, plentiful violence, and some creative spins on classic horror movie scenarios. As I watched it, I was often reminded of The Cabin in the Woods with its portrayal of both the scenario at its center and the enigmatic figures who are manipulating it, but whereas that film went for cutting satire and meta humor, this focuses more on the Lovecraftian cosmic horror elements of its story, sitting just underneath the surface of its main slasher plot. It's certainly one of the most visually unique horror films I've seen in a long while, one that serves up plenty of stylish deaths, chase scenes, and more even if there were a few points where the direction felt shaky. It's a minor gem of a film that I'm surprised hasn't been talked about more, and which I'd love to see a sequel to.

Our protagonist Miriam DeKalb is the director of an antiwar nonprofit who is bitterly estranged from her father Cyrus, the head of a defense contractor and onetime Vice Presidential candidate. Cyrus has invited all four of his kids to his headquarters for a private meeting, in which he reveals that he's dying and expresses his disappointment with all of them: Miriam for reasons that should be obvious given her job description, Kelsy for having become a drugged-up trophy wife to one of his competitors, Ethan for being a sexual deviant who walked away from the family business to become a musician, Colin for being gay and making him look bad to his conservative supporters, and all of them for sinking his political career when they revealed the extent to which he abused them and their mother growing up. He plans to have all of them killed in the name of preserving his legacy. The next morning, Miriam steps out of the headquarters of DeKalb Industries as the only survivor, covered in blood and holding a fire axe, and is taken to the hospital under police custody, where it becomes clear that they don't believe her story and think she's a murderer, especially given her own history of mental health issues and institutionalization. In steps a mysterious woman with supernatural abilities known only as the Gamemaster, who promises to send Miriam back in time 24 hours to save her family. Seeing no other way out, Miriam takes her up on the offer, and reenters the building where her father had her siblings killed with foreknowledge of what will happen. Her "benefactor", however, has other ideas, and is in this mainly for her own amusement and that of other strange beings from a world not our own.

The plot of this film is a multilayered one, with one story happening on the surface and another one going on just beneath. The main story is a mix of a slasher, torture porn, and a family soap opera in which the DeKalb offspring battle the machinations of their murderous father and his army of goons, and while it is fairly conventional, it is well-told. The four kids as a whole get a surprising amount of development and personality, all of them resenting one another for various reasons and having to come together to survive and defeat Cyrus, and their mostly unknown voice actors did a great job. I especially liked Dani Lennon as the heroine Miriam, with both her performance and the art design for her character conveying her seeming as though she's slowly going mad thanks to both the experience and the Gamemaster's manipulation. Ray Wise's villainous patriarch Cyrus was written as a mix of Dick Cheney and Donald Trump at their worst, and he played the character with a dash of hammy villainy on top that turned out to be very enjoyable, making for an interesting and truly despicable bastard who far overshadowed his rather forgettable minions. Pavel, the badly scarred Two Face-looking guy voiced by Bill Moseley who carries around the eyes of a woman he killed, had the best moments of them, but unfortunately, he also got the least screen time, with the other two, Angus and Jurek, being little more than Irish and Eastern European stereotypes respectively.

The other part of the plot was where the real fun came in. Morena Baccarin was a delight as the Gamemaster, the possibly demonic/alien/what-have-you creature from beyond our world who takes the form of an attractive human woman and is observing the events unfolding not just from the sidelines, but occasionally as an active participant guiding the events to the preferred outcome of her and her friends, who are betting on everything and pressuring her to spice things up whenever they get boring. Thanks to her intervention, time is not what it seems, as she frequently fools around with it when things aren't going her way and makes it clear to Miriam that, above all else, she's there to make things interesting, not necessarily to save anyone's lives. As the Gamemaster increases her meddling in the killing spree, Miriam increasingly feels less like a final girl and more like the protagonist of a different kind of horror story: cosmic horror, one in which she's little more than the plaything of beings far beyond her understanding, and is probably not going to walk away from it all in one piece mentally even if she survives. The ending leaves enough things open to keep it ambiguous, but the implications it gives are dark, and help wrap this film up on a high note.

The big thing differentiating this film from others like it, of course, is the unique style that the medium of animation lends it. It offers up some neat, over-the-top death traps that often defy logic (how was the scale in the tray Kelsy was supposed to spill her blood into able to stop her from just pressing down on it in order to trick it?) but still made for some creative murder set pieces. The dark corridors and offices of the corporate tower where the film takes place were well-utilized, lending the film a slick atmosphere. The art look lifted from a horror comic, complete with unique uses of color that you can't necessarily pull off in a live-action film without it looking silly, but which here felt like flipping through the pages of the kind of book that your parents would never have let you read when you were a kid. Some of the pacing felt a bit off, particularly a scene where Miriam freezes in fear while Jurek is taunting her that didn't ring true and felt like it would've played better if we were reading Jurek's speech to her in a graphic novel, but for the most part, this was a film that moved very nicely. In the few moments when it turned boring, it seemed to recognize as much and play to that effect, by having the Gamemaster's gambling friends complain about what happened and demand that she make things more to their liking.

The Bottom Line

Packed with style to spare, To Your Last Death makes great use of the medium and tells a very dark and interesting cosmic horror story wrapped in a violent splatter flick, and comes highly recommended for any fans of adult animation.