Pet (2016)★★★★☆

This movie starts out simple enough: your typical boy meets girl, girl rejects boy, boy kidnaps girl and keeps her in a cage in a basement story.

And then it gets interesting. But it takes a while to get there. While the first half of the film doesn’t drag on, it does feel like a slow build up to something that then takes a totally different turn.

It’s kind of a jolt to the viewer, especially since the twist is revealed so quickly after the slow build up that if you blink, you’ll miss it. They spend all this time developing Seth as a character and Holly as a sex object that when Holly as a character shows up it’s disorienting.

But it’s an interesting sort of disorientation. The story gets a bit more predictable after the twist, but it’ll have you hooked by then. The ending did raise a lot of questions for me, but nothing that really detracted from my enjoyment of the film.

Both Dominic Monaghan as Seth and Ksenia Solo as Holly are excellent, and the abandoned basement/tunnel setting is sufficiently creepy. It’s definitely a movie for the horror fans out there, and one I’d definitely recommend.