Rites of Spring (2012)★★★☆☆

It’s officially the first day of Spring on this side of the world, so I finally watched this one. I’d actually started it on Netflix a couple months back, but stopped when I realized it could be used as a seasonally-appropriate choice a short time later.

But I must have misjudged how much was left of the movie when I stopped it, because I swear there were only about ten minutes I hadn’t already seen. Maybe I was expecting it to get interesting all of a sudden? Maybe I was distracted the first time and didn’t realize how long I’d been watching? It was kind of a letdown to have waited so long for so little.

That said, it wasn’t a bad movie. I think the filmmakers couldn’t decide whether they wanted a crime drama or a horror film, so they just threw them both together. Oh, except that one character from the horror part and one character from the crime drama part already know each other. So they aren’t thrown together for no reason, at least. (Spoilers ahead) Still, the plot of both parts is already rather thin, and since it’s unclear to me what happened to the little girl they kidnapped anyway (did I blink and miss a scene?), the crime drama side strikes me as completely unnecessary.

And the ending is kind of anticlimactic. No, strike that, the ending is really anticlimactic, and requires suspension not only of disbelief, but also of belief of mythology you learned earlier in the movie. That, or no one ever tried to stop that thing before.

Or I may be a little bitter that I waited two months to finish this movie and all I got was this stupid ending.