Today’s quick review: Till Death. To rekindle their cooling marriage, Emma (Megan Fox) lets her husband Mark (Eoin Macken) take her to their lakehouse for a romantic getaway. But Mark has a sadistic surprise for her. In the morning, Emma wakes to find that Mark has handcuffed himself to her and shot himself in the head. Trapped in a remote cabin with no gas, no tools, and a heavy corpse, Emma must use her wits to get back to civilization alive.
Till Death is a crime thriller about a woman caught up in an elaborate revenge scheme by her controlling husband. With his dying act Mark takes a credible stab at ruining Emma’s life, showing spiteful ingenuity in the way he anticipates and cuts off every possible response she has to being chained to his corpse. The result is a minimalistic thriller with tense conflict and some creative ideas, but ultimately only niche appeal.
Till Death is worth watching for Mark’s trap and Emma’s reaction to it. Mark takes every pain to make Emma’s predicament inescapble, doing everything from disabling her cell phone to removing every sharp or heavy object in the house. But in spite of the tall odds, Emma never gives up. Seeing her meticulously look for a way out gives the movie a nice sense of tension, while seeing the twisted ruins of their relationship is a bonus.
Till Death’s main shortcoming is that it is loosely structured. Anyone drawn to the kind of careful planning shown by Mark will be disappointed at how much of what happens is ultimately out of his hands. He sets up every part of the trap, one way or another, but past a relatively early point in the movie, Emma and one or two other parties are driving the action. This doesn’t diminish the tension, but it does shift the focus some.
How much you get out of Till Death will depend heavily on taste. The movie has fragments of several different powerful ideas, including the failure of a marriage through the delusional eyes of a manipulative husband, a posthumous trap, and a woman left to fend for herself at a cabin in the cold. But none of these are enough to carry the others, meaning that to appreciate Till Death, you will need a taste for its particular ideas.
Give it a shot when you’re in the mood for a minimalistic thriller with a nice mixture of spite and perseverance. Skip it if you are looking for more wholesome thrills. For a simpler thriller about a woman trapped in a cabin, try Hush.
[5.8 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11804152/). I give it a 6.5 for a darkly interesting puzzle.