FUN.
It’s safe to say that Abby and Sam are not in a healthy relationship.
“FUN.” is a messy- both literally and cinematically- horror film with a broken relationship at its core. Abby (played by writer and co-director Robbie Barnes) has not been the same since she got back from active duty; she has been having significant PTSD that has made it hard for her to reunite physically with her wife, Sam (played by co-director Kinsley Funari). Sam isn’t exactly a caring significant other, however; we can see from practically the first time they are on-screen together that her feelings are more focused on her needs than Abby’s. When you combine that with a dark web “red room” where people pay two guys to do unspeakable things to their captives, it’s safe to say a relationship is going to be tested.
The way the film is structured, the “red room” is set up first, with a pre-credits scene involving bullying and someone coming to the bullied’s needs at an opportune time. After the credits, we meet up with Abby and Sam. How the two are combined in Barnes’s screenplay I will not divulge here, although I will say that, when they are combined, it happens in a way that we’re not quite expecting, and it leads into everything that happens during the rest of the film. Before it gets to that moment, there isn’t really anything organic to having the two elements in the same movie, and it throws off the balance in the movie. All the while, however, I remained engaged in each moment, though, and that is why it works. I’m not sure if it needed to be a horror-movie-hefty 116 minutes, but each story element in the film needs to be there for the final product to work.
A movie like this requires people making it who enjoy the genre behind the camera, and Barnes and her collaborators seem to enjoy this genre quite a bit. Relish it, even. The film may be messy narratively, but at least it’s moving in a forward direction, and an interesting direction, every step of the way. And the horror parts, when they do come, are wonderfully gory to watch- I’m not always into that type of horror, but it’s done effectively here, and serves a narrative purpose beyond just exploitative violence. All the while, it comes back to Abby, what she’s going through, and how she tries to cope with the traumas that are haunting her. Her mechanisms for coping might not be the healthiest, but we know she’s a survivor. She can get through whatever this twisted little horror film throws at her.
