- Directed by Richard Shepard
- Written by Richard Shepard, Nicole Snyder, Eric C. Charmelo
- Stars Allison Williams, Logan Browning, Steven Weber
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 30 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anuxR8q0p1E
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was an excellent movie to go into blind. It starts out as one thing, then goes somewhere else. And somewhere else again. Some things could be predicted and some things not. We really liked it a lot. Very entertaining.
Spoilery Synopsis
A woman lies dead in bed, with people talking in the hallway. With her mother dead, Charlotte may be able to go back to performing, something she hasn’t done in years. She gave up her career to care for her ailing mother. Credits roll.
Charlotte calls Anton and Paloma and leaves a message about joining them in Shanghai. She sees a billboard for Elizabeth Wells, who is now a big cello star. She meets Paloma and Anton at a concert. Lizzie is there as well, and Charlotte clearly doesn’t like all the praise that she’s been receiving. Theis and Geoffrey, two old teachers, are there too. We get a flash to Charlotte shaving her head, slicing her wrists, and getting shock therapy.
Lizzie and Charlotte talk, Lizzie says she would never leave the group, but she is going on vacation starting tomorrow. As they come back inside, a man throws up, gets a nosebleed, and collapses. There’s some kind of hemorrhagic fever down south, and someone thinks maybe that’s what he had.
Anton asks Lizzie to play for them, and she asks Charlotte to play 2nd chair. Charlotte says she’s an amateur now, but also doesn’t take much convincing. It goes well, and we see the two of them running off and kissing, dancing, and having lots of smoochy fun afterward.
Lizzle asks Charlotte to go on her trip with her tomorrow. Lizzie doesn’t feel well before they leave, but she only has a few days and doesn’t want to waste it. They get on a cheap, nasty bus to somewhere, and Charlotte admits she can’t speak Mandarin at all. Lizzie swears she’ll be fine.
She’s not fine. She pukes all over the bus, just like that guy last night. The bus driver angrily pulls over to let her poop in the road, and it’s a whole scene. Lizzie cries and whines a lot, but there’s not much Charlotte can do to help on the bus. She pukes again, and this time, it’s full of squirming bugs. She freaks out, scratching at herself, and the angry bus driver wants them off the bus.
Walking through the Chinese countryside, Lizzie insists that she’s dying and Charlotte needs to stay away from her. Lizzie sees things crawling around underneath her skin; Charlotte sees it too. Charlotte pulls out a great big cleaver, and Lizzie cuts her own hand off.
We flashback to Charlotte giving Lizzie some of her mother’s hallucinogenic drugs. She got the cleaver from a food cart guy. She faked the rest to convince Lizzie that she had bugs inside her. Soon, Lizzie isn’t going to be any competition for the cello jobs.
Three weeks later, at Anton’s music academy, Anton welcomes Zhang Li, the new student that we saw perform in Shanghai. Zhang Li’s mother leaves in a cab, and Lizzie comes to the gate, with only one hand. She tells the story from her point of view; she says she took some pills and cut her hand off. She does blame Charlotte; she really knows everything. The next day, Anton and Paloma kick her out, he doesn’t want her around the place now.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, Charlotte is home alone and is hearing noises from inside the house. Lizzie is there and gets her with a Taser…
Anton and Paloma can’t get into the academy because Lizzie is blocking the driveway. She has Charlotte in the trunk of her car. Anton realizes that both women are crazy. Charlotte explains how she was helping Lizzie; she knows what Anton does to all his girls. She’s come back to save all the girls from him.
We flash back to Anton going full Weinstein on young Charlotte. He demands perfection, and he’s very serious about it.
Charlotte wakes up on stage in Anton’s special room. She’s all dressed up and chained to the floor. Theis and Geoffrey are there, as is Lizzie and Paloma. She accuses him of raping both herself and Lizzie, but Lizzie’s on his side. He makes her play, warning her that if she makes a single mistake, it will be Zhang Li who pays the price.
Charlotte argues, but in the end, she has no choice but to play. She does, in fact, play perfectly, and Anton sends Zhang Li back upstairs. He leaves the room, telling Theis and Geoffrey to “come and get me when she stops biting.”
The two old pervs move in on her, but Lizzie says she wants her first. Suddenly, the two old teachers collapse and die; Lizzie has poisoned them both. Charlotte smiles and Lizzie kisses her; we get a flashback to the Taser incident and the two of them making up. Lizzie knows that Charlotte was actually right with all this.
Paloma walks to Anton’s study, and she’s got a knife in the back. It’s the two former cellists against Anton now. He admits that he’s sick and promises to get help. They both gang up on him and slice him to bits. Charlotte gets her arm graphically sliced in the process.
Lizzie, who’s missing an arm, and Charlotte, who’s also missing one, work together, each contributing a hand to play the cello for Anton, who has no arms or legs at all as well as his eyes and mouth sewn shut. But they left him his ears…
Commentary
The Mount Rushmore of horror: Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and that Chinese bus driver. Wow.
This was two full years before either COVID or the Weinstein trial, and it predicted both quite well. We went into this blind, and thought we were going to get a plague movie for quite a while.
Still, it twisted and turned a few times, and some of it we predicted– and some, we didn’t. We were definitely entertained by this.