Privilege, The

I hate to tell an ambitious movie to pick a lane… but, seriously, this movie needs to pick a lane. The movie starts with one set of disturbing behavior and ends with a whole new bunch of freaky weirdness. Is this movie about killer fungus or is it about ghosts? Or ghost fungus? Or psychic spies trying to steal your mind’s elation? It’s all over the place.

This German / Netflix film is about a teenage kid who is having weird visions and, I dunno, something, something fungus. It’s hard to pin down a succinct description of its plot. Something weird is going on and he needs to figure it out. Is the thing goin on in his head or are there really psychic fungus demon ghosts from planet X? And what’s up with the pills? And the psychic detectives? And the electronic voice phenomenon?

A lot of this movie simply lost my interest as it spins through its galaxy of all the ideas all the other horror and supernatural films have done. It’s a hard recommendation… but the end of the film is surprisingly strong once it finally does pick a lane (but, even then, it still goes spiraling out of control with even more ideas).

A lot of this movie needn’t have happened to get to its final destination. There are a lot of red herrings here… except maybe they aren’t all red herrings though maybe they are still misdirection? But also maybe the hour 45 minute runtime could have been cut back to a solid hour of consistent, more interesting content. Maybe if I rewatched it, all the weird jigsaw pieces will fit… or maybe not.

The film is well produced and looks good, at least. Someone put some effort into the movie… and someone else put some effort into a wild night on the town script. I can’t say they didn’t try.

It’s a curious little suspense, paranoia, horror film about fungus ghost demon possession or something. It’s not very successful in convincing me it was worth the sit… there’s a lot of wheel-spinning and time-wasting here. But I think there’s a nugget of something that could have been better (and a solid conclusion). It’s kind of a cool movie despite its best efforts.

Score: 70