Casting director Alan Scott Neal makes his feature-length debut with “Last Straw (2024),” a chilling slasher that is too high on its own supply. So much so that despite clear signs of brilliance simmering down the surface, you get a distant, often flat-out uninteresting genre exercise that doesn’t know what to do with its gore-filled premise. The result is a disappointing thriller that is too eager to please but never knows what buttons to push and when to move them.
The story follows Nancy (Jessica Belkin), a young, pretty girl who finds out that she is pregnant. From the offset, we are introduced to her as someone who doesn’t care what her life is all about or what she is going to do with the baby that is now growing in her belly. She casually talks about the pregnancy to her best friend Tabitha (Tara Raani), discussing who could possibly be the father.
Nancy is not a likable character — she insists on things that she wants, but never truly feels like a well-realized character that should be taken seriously. Beyond her party-girl persona and her day job as a waitress cum manager at her father’s rural roadside diner, there’s nothing really there to root for her, despite the aforementioned condition. The movie, also, doesn’t try to make her likable, which in turn makes this interesting for the time being. However, director Neal is also interested in turning his home-invasion narrative (which is set in the diner itself) by not just following the victim but also the oppressor.
Things truly kick in when Nancy is left alone at the diner to take the night shift. Earlier in the day her father tells her that she needs to own up to being the manager of their place, so when a bunch of masked teenagers try to create a ruckus, she is forced to confront them alone; mostly because everyone else on the staff believes that she doesn’t deserve her position as the manager just because she is the owner’s daughter. Nancy is able to shoo off the intruders by making a fake call to the police but they are upfront about getting back to her.
Pretty interestingly, director Neal inserts a solid twist in the tale midway through. Like last year’s “Barbarian,” this isn’t a complete 360, but it somehow shifts the perspective a little. That said, beyond the said twist, the movie falls flat on its face. The other important characters in the tale — most importantly Jake (Taylor Kowalski), feel interesting on paper, but the treatment and the drive that is given to them, or him are not rooted enough to make the story’s sorry push and pull interesting.
The only saving grace thus remains Andrey Nikolaev’s gorgeous cinematography and Alan Palomo’s intriguing score. Pretty much everything, including the performances is not enough to uplift this film from being dead on arrival.
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