Imagine a game of truth or dare with your friends. You can find out their secrets or make them do something they would never normally do. Kiss a friend, confess your crush, show an embarrassing photo of yourself — the possibilities are endless. After the game ends, there’s no speaking of it.
But for the characters in the film “Truth or Dare,” the game follows them home and brings the terror with.
“Truth or Dare” combines all the expected horror movie concepts of demons, death, gore and suspense with the occasional comical moment, to offset the film’s darkness.
Blumhouse Productions, producers of “Get Out” and “Split,” created a film capable of preventing anyone from playing a game of truth or dare ever again. A group of college students play the game with a stranger when they’re partying in Mexico, not knowing it would soon take over their lives.
Like “Get Out” and “Split,” this film became an intense thrill ride after hardly any time had passed. Returning from their trip, the group discovers that they must continue to play the game in order to live. Refuse to answer a question: Die. Refuse to do the dare: Die.
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Like most supernatural horror movies, one character notices that something isn’t right and must convince the others — only to be ignored. She feels like she’s going crazy, which adds to the psychological-horror undertones of the movie.
When Olivia, played by Lucy Hale, must confess her first truth, it creates tension between the friend group. As more supernatural occurrences take place, the group comes together to survive… or try to.
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But nothing positive can last long in a horror movie, as the game’s questions of truth or dare begin to test the friends’ relationships with themselves and each other as the story progresses.
The supernatural entity can over take the body of anyone, which causes them to have a unsettlingly sinister smile. One character even sees the smile on her own face when she’s looking into a mirror. Moments later, she was balancing herself atop a roof.
This feeling of unsettlement caused from the evil smile decreases as the film progresses and becomes more of comic relief, since it happens almost a little too often.
One would think the characters would constantly pick truth to avoid a hazardous dare, but the film writers saw this coming. Players of the game can only answer truth twice in a row, forcing the third player to choose dare. This creative choice creates an intense suspension, as the audience counts down the order of players to figure out who will have to play the dare.
As characters begin to lose to the game, they die in gruesome ways. There’s always at least one other character who is with the unfortunate one at their time of death. As the witness screams, their fear seems to transpire through the screen into the audience.
The remaining survivors are at a point of desperation — as anyone would feel if death was haunting them. They decide to track down what started this curse in the beginning before they fall prey to the game. The entire film is a suspenseful rush, but having only a few characters remaining has the audience questioning if they will find a solution in time.
When a film can take a common game and put a dark twist on it, it creates an internal fear in all who have played before.
So now a question to you: Truth or Dare?
Rank: 3.5/5
