Synopsis:
A woman invites historical re-enactors (or are they?) into her home to give her family an “authentic” first Thanksgiving – but, you know, with less focus on the genocide and stuff – really, she just wants a fancy upper-middle class “experience” she can brag to her friends about, even though she keeps saying it is to “bring the family together.”
However, things are not going quite how she’d hoped. Those damned pilgrims will not break character for anything, and they’re weird. Like, really weird.
This is the latest installment in Hulu/Blumhouse’s Into the Dark television series which showcases original, holiday-themed horror stories. It is also apparently the second Thanksgiving-centric entry. Apparently last year they did one called Flesh and Blood, which I’ve not seen yet.
My Edition:
Hulu
My Thoughts:
Did you know that pilgrims were inherently boring? Yeah, it’s true. Pilgrims were super lame. There’s just something about Puritanism . . . oh yeah, it’s probably that their whole schtick is BEING FUCKING BORING.
That being said, this movie starts off r e a l l y s l o w l y. Honestly, I almost turned it off a few times. The only things that kept me hanging on were that I liked Cody, and I thought that Ethan and Patience were just bonkers enough that it might get interesting.
Unfortunately, accounting for its 90 minute run-time, that means that I spent about an hour occasionally yelling “Someone better get pilgrim-murdered soon!” before anyone actually got pilgrim-murdered. But when they did, they got pilgrim-murdered fairly well. I wasn’t mad at the kills. Although for the record, they’re pretty much never going to go down how you expect.
Patience is basically the Michael Meyers of this movie – she’s confusingly hard to kill. I thought she would die more than once (because she should have), which makes me wonder – were these folks supernatural, or just murderous crazies? There’s some ambiguity in the story there, so it feels open to interpretation a little, and I’m not really sure where I align my beliefs.
The first two-thirds of the movie play out like the kind of holiday-themed family drama that I just don’t give a shit about, but the last third got almost grindhouse-y, which I think was a lot of fun. I wish more of the movie had been like that. This is a premise that could have been a lot of fun if the writer/director had been more interested in having fun with it – despite the comedy bits scattered throughout, the pacing still made it feel like the story wanted to be taken seriously.
Pilgrim was written and directed by Marcus Dunstan, who wrote Feast (which I LOVE), but I feel like he might have been reigning himself in way too hard here – although a slightly deeper dive tells me that he also wrote the later (post-III) Saw movies, and I hated every entry into that franchise after the first one (why was it ever even franchised? ugh), so maybe my love of Feast was an exception rather than the rule. Who knows. I feel like I began losing the thread a little there. No matter what, I liked Feast, but I’m ambivalent-to-totally-not-into the rest of his output apparently.
Rating:
I just wanted more. More killing, more havoc, more something.
Episode Title: Pilgrim
Series: Into the Dark
First Aired: November 1, 2019
Hulu | Blumhouse
Seasonal Horror
Rated: TV-MA
90 Minutes
Available on Hulu
