Night of the Caregiver – Review
Written by Craig Hamann
Directed by Joe Cornet
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below. Remember, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
A caregiver and a sweet, elderly woman find themselves in grave danger as something demonic dwells in their home.
There’s a classic horror movie trope about babysitters alone with their charge.
Night of the Caregiver tweaks that a bit, giving a film a premise more in line with The Skeleton Key than anything else.
Eileen Dietz is great as Lillian, the seemingly infirm old lady who needs a caregiver. She’s simultaneously lovable and creepy.
Natalie Denise Sperl’s Juliet is a competent, if overworked, nurse who sidelines private care gigs like Lillian to make some extra money.
We learn early on from a cop’s questioning of Eric Roberts character that there is some sort of regular series of disappearances, specifically every 13 years. Guess when the last one was?
Correct.
So, the set-up is good, if not ground-breaking. Our two main players are good as well. The vibe of Lillian’s house is suitably creepy, and the creature design is pretty tight. Victim selection makes sense in terms of the overall story…
How can my overall impression of the movie not be good?
I’ll tell you. The script subjects our cast to some absolutely egregiously bad dialogue as we reach the climactic showdown between our caregiver and her tormentor. Reading like a first draft, it’s presented with the emotion and impact of someone reading it for the first time, but I don’t know whether that can be attributed to the actors or if the script is simply SO BAD that no one could make those words work on screen.
Therefore, while I was enjoying the general jist and feel of the film for most of its running time, once the third act started, everything started to simply roll off until it became a chore to finish.
I’d rather a movie be bad from the start than for some reason simply decline as it goes along, but that’s the situation I find myself in with Night of the Caregiver…
And I WANTED to enjoy it. For about the first 75% of it, I DID.
Dang it.
Night of the Caregiver is currently available in theaters and VOD, with a DVD release this fall, and stars Natalie Denise Sperl, Eileen Dietz, Anna Oris, and Joe Cornet, with a special appearance by Eric Roberts.
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