The Tutor is a movie that wants to be good but spends so much time thinking a monotone soundtrack and a dark color palette is enough to get it there. It wasn’t… it was barely enough to keep my eyes open with its omnipresent hum of dullness.

The flick is about an adult tutor who takes a job teaching a rich teen boy. The teenager is a bit odd and quickly gains an unhealthy obsession with the tutor.

It’s kind of just another one of those dark obsession movies… only with some twists that should have made it more interesting but ultimately hardly mattered. The movie is just too humdrum. I kept waiting for it to get really messed up or really campy or really anything at all. But all it ever was was this constant background drone.

Noah Schnapp plays the obsessed teen and it took me too long realize he was Will Byers from Stranger Things. I think we, as the movie watching public, should be warned that those damn Stranger Things kids keep growing up. How is that fair? Don’t we feel old enough already?

This movie is dull and lifeless for so long that, when it finally gets around to an “interesting” third act, I barely had the ambition to look up and give a non-committal “huh”. In a better movie, it’d have been a cool, interesting finale… but since nothing in this movie is cool or interesting, it was continued failure to launch in the 11th hour.

I’ve seen far worse movies in this sub-genre of thriller. It’s sorta passably watchable if you have the spare time and a lot of focus. On the other hand you could get your own tutor and learn about, I dunno, 19th century French politics or the aerodynamics of the common housefly or existential philosophy by way of the unfair aging patterns of Stranger Things actors.

Score: 68