- Directed by Beth De Araujo
- Written by Beth De Araujo
- Stars Stefanie Estes, Olivia Luccardi, Dana Millican
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9caXYrlADa0
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This one is skillfully done as one continuous take in real time. It really makes it interesting, and it’s not a typical horror film. Things start out calmly and normal and go off the rails worse and worse as it goes along. It’s an uncomfortable watch, but it’s worth sticking with it to see where things end up.
Synopsis
Emily takes a frantic pregnancy test and soon ends up crying. Is she or isn’t she? We’re not sure. She leaves the restroom and heads back inside the school.
She steps outside again to talk to Brian, whose mother is late picking him up from school. She’s written a children’s book, and she lets him read it. The janitor goes into the classroom, and Emily tells little Brian to go inside and tell the Hispanic janitor not to mop until the classroom is empty. (Why couldn’t she do this herself? Also, the classroom was empty at that point.)
As he goes inside to do Emily’s dirty work, Brian’s mother shows up and asks what he’s doing. Emily lies and says Brian almost slipped and hurt himself, which he didn’t. She says she’s trying to get Brian to be more assertive; Brian’s mom is grateful for the lesson. Brian and his mother go home.
Emily walks down a path carrying a pie for some friends. She declines a collect call from Jeff, who is a prison inmate. Credits roll.
Another woman passes her on the trail. She says she’s meeting Kim; Emily is meeting Kim too, but she doesn’t know this woman, who is Leslie. They talk as they walk, and go upstairs into a church for their meeting.
Emily unveils her pie, which has a swastika carved into it. Kim hurriedly cuts up the pie and hands it around. Emily says they are there to “support each other through this multicultural warfare.” She says she wants a baby but is having trouble getting pregnant. She thinks this new club might be a higher purpose for her. “Daughters for Aryan Unity” is on the sign behind them.
Marjorie complains that she’d been working two years to become manager, but some Colombian girl got the job and she didn’t. The racism starts flying.
Alice goes next, and she’s inspired by being with like-minded people. “All lives matter!”
Jessica says he’s a lifelong Klan and Stormfront member. “Multiculturalism doesn’t work.”
Kim just hates Jews and wants to use her journalism degree to help. She wants to start a newsletter.
Leslie goes last and tells about her time in prison. She kind of misses the structure of being there.
Emily adds stuff about feminism and sexuality and starts crying at the destruction of the normal family.
The pastor of the church they’re using comes in and asks Emily to leave. “Go right now, and I won’t report you,” he warns. The meeting breaks up, but Emily doesn’t say why.
Some of them agree to go to Emily’s house after the meeting. They stop at Kim’s grocery store for wine and snacks. Some brown people come in, and the store owner says they’re closed, which soon devolves into an argument and a fight. Kim knows one of them, whose name is Anne.
Emily’s husband Craig shows up at the end of the fight, and everyone’s crying because they’re the victims. Leslie and Marjorie want to follow the other women home and do something nasty to them. Craig shakes his head silently and warns Emily that she’s talking about committing a felony. She calls him a stupid fairy pussy. He decides to go along with it and suggests all the women leave their phones in the store so they can’t be tracked. He’s not so much into the white supremacist stuff, but he seems to know all about crime.
They stop at Anne’s house. Craig doesn’t like the layout of the place and says they probably won’t all get out unseen. The women are loud and obnoxious, not at all like burglars, but they break in and go through Anne’s stuff. They find Anne’s passport, but Craig comes in and says their five minutes are up. A car drives up, and he tells them all to hide.
Anne comes in and Craig grabs her. Kim has a gun, and Leslie threatens to kill Anne. Craig wants to leave, but Emily tells him to stop whining. He runs into the other girl, Lily, outside and grabs her too. “Please don’t make me hurt you,” he warns. He gets scared, or he’s just being smarter than the women, and storms off.
The five women don’t know what to do, but Leslie wants “to scare the shit out of them.” Marjorie agrees. Kim and Emily cry; this wasn’t supposed to happen. Emily agrees to scare them, clean up, and get out. They turn up some music and force the girls to drink booze and eat candy as they cry in terror. Lily stops breathing; she’s allergic to peanuts.
Lily dies, and Anne cries. The other girls freak out over what they’ve done. Emily blames this all on Leslie, and they argue. There is much screaming. Leslie smothers Anne with a pillow as the others clean up their fingerprints.
Emily comes up with a plan to dump the bodies in the lake and make it look like nothing happened. Emily continues to clean up as the others carry the bodies out to the van. It’s dark when they arrive at the boat dock, isolated and alone out in the woods.
Emily struggles by herself to get the little rowboat into the water as the others bring the bodies from the van. Leslie and Emily get in the boat as the others wait on the shore. They dump the tarp full of bodies overboard and row away. Soon after, Anne pops up to the surface; she wasn’t really dead.
Commentary
Soccer moms and elementary school teachers are just the worst, aren’t they?
This is a whole different kind of horror. It starts off a little weird with the janitor thing, and then we see the pie. It just gets worse and worse from there. For a long while, I thought it would all be the woman talking in their meeting, but it went to all kinds of strange places after that.
It’s all done in one long unbroken take, in real time. I don’t know how many edits they really had, but it all looked like one shot. There’s no real soundtrack, and there’s lots of screaming. Still, it’s tense, and you have to keep with it to see how far out of control this can all go.
It’s all really good, and it’ll probably make you uncomfortable as well, so it’s a pretty awesome film.