Whether or not you think it deserves it, the online property-hire business Airbnb is taking a pasting of late, and now even horror films are piling in to sully its name. In this snappily edited film, a house in the desert near Joshua Tree national park (judging by the local flora) appears to have been double-booked, leading to murderous results. They complain about the circular frustration created by their inability to compare booking confirmations because they don’t have the code for the house’s wifi, which is accessible only on the Airbnb app, which they can’t access because of lack of wifi or phone signal. Typical first-world problems.
But the director, Travis Greene, and the screenwriter, Jonathan Buchanan, have more on their minds than shaming the booking service, mainly how to make the different crisscrossing timelines in the story make narrative sense without continuity errors, as the film cuts between four time periods in a single day. In the first, property co-owner Jessie shows up to clean a bungalow full of twee, millennial-friendly knick-knacks, as if the set designer went mad with a credit card in Urban Outfitters. At a different point that day, we see Instagram influencer Sam (Alisha Soper) and her actor boyfriend Dwayne (William Gabriel Grier)arrive at the house and unexpectedly meet a creepy middle-aged couple named Liz (Rosanne Limeres) and Richard (Tim Simek) already there, and insistent they have hired the place.
In a separate timeline, Sam and Dwayne are nowhere to be seen, but their friends Carrie (Aly Trasher) and Ricky (Eddy Acosta) arrive and also meet Liz and Richard, have very similar strained conversations about who should have access to the house and so on. Finally, in the last crepuscular timeline, two local sheriffs (Laura Buckles and Patrick Joseph Rieger) arrive to investigate a 911 call reporting the finding of dead bodies. Given the only other character in the movie is a waitress (scene-stealer Nancy Linehan Charles), it is not hard to work out where this is going if you just do the maths. Still, there’s a certain amount of nasty fun to be had watching the assorted couples get drunk and tear strips off each other, in a metaphoric sense at least, before the violence kicks off – as if Greene were aiming to make a cross between Scream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• 8 Found Dead is released on 23 October on digital platforms.
