So this movie completely snuck under my radar, probably because it was a PeacockTV exclusive. The movie is about a couple of friends who go to an isolated cabin to spend their quarantine while killers hunt them down. As the title of the movie may suggest, COVID-19 is a major plot point of the movie as it takes place in April 2020.
How COVID gets handled in movies and shows can get dicey due to how politicized it has become here in America. Sick handled it well in my opinion. The movie portrays COVID from the lens of GenZ, where the characters mostly see it as an inconvenience, while still taking it seriously. The rest of the movie though?
The movie did not really stand out to me, I found myself pausing it constantly to do other things. There were definitely instances of creative cinematography as the camera would move to establish distances and locations of characters. The movie also got creative with its kills, as it is at its core, a slasher. My favorite was when the killers stabbed through one of the friends with a pole and carried his body outside in a way that made it look like he was walking. But the characters weren’t really interesting. No one really had any depth beyond their initial character traits.
I think I had such a hard time being engaged by this movie. The premise isn’t revolutionary by any means but please give me some characters I actually want to watch. This movie was only around 80 minutes though so I guess I can excuse shallow characters for a fast-paced movie. It felt like once the killers first interacted with our main character, the movie never slowed down until the end.
I’m sorry but I’m going to have to spoil the plot to be able to get my true thoughts out. As I said in the first paragraph, COVID is a massive plot point. The characters are at a cabin due to the lockdown. They get hunted down by the killers because one of them attended or hosted an “End of the World” party as the pandemic started and their son went, got sick, and died. I’ll be honest, I think that is a really dumb motivation for the killers, who are a family. When they reveal their motivation to our final girl Parker, they blame her for kissing their son Benji and not being masked around each other. But when Parker points out that Benji went to the party and wasn’t masked himself, they just lash out.
I can understand that they would be rageful that their son died after going out to a party that should not have been thrown in the first place, but at no point did they accept the fact that their son was also responsible for the events that took place. It might be dumb for me to be thinking too much into it, but the movie just didn’t have a good enough reason otherwise to try to kill Parker.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, I don’t want to say that Sick was a bad or enjoyable movie. It didn’t stick to me personally, but it could be a fun, quick watch if you want something that you also probably hadn’t heard of. I love horror movies good or bad, but it is hard to love a movie that just isn’t that interesting. It has its value like all movies do, but at the end of the day, it’s probably a movie I forget about soon and don’t rewatch.
