Let me be clear here: This is a film that looks and feels like a particularly well-funded student film. There’s some pretty clever filmmaking flourishes here, such as Leo Grillo’s Grant having a POV with darker colors while Katherine Heigl’s Marissa has harsher, brighter color for her POV, denoting their respective mental states, but it definitely looks like a sort of film that only cost a million bucks. In that way I kind of dig it. I love when weird, trippy movies like this have a relatively small budget and have to get creative with their weirdness. Of course, the cheapness does lead to some truly uncanny CGI for a few hallucinatory facial distortions, but it almost feels deliberate.

The story is honestly not awful, but it has its fair share of problems. Two people have an affair, one of their partners tries to kill them over it, the tables get turned, they take the body out to the desert for disposal, they get stuck, the man starts going crazy and thinks the girl is a succubus… It’s a little weird and not groundbreaking, which is fine, but it’s honestly not weird enough to make up for some of its shortcomings. I think maybe if they had more budget they could’ve gone further and played up the supernatural elements to add more ambiguity, but it’s a bit too clear from the beginning that Grant is going cuckoo for Coco Puffs. I don’t think I was ever convinced for more than a couple of minutes that Marissa was actually some demon temptress.

It doesn’t really help that Leo Grillo is just not a very good actor, which is exacerbated by him sharing the screen with Heigl and Tom Sizemore, who are. While I did find some of his deliveries fine, I mainly saw him as the weak link of the cast with awkward reads and just a lack of effort in his performance. Again, this is contrasting with Heigl, who is working wonders with the what she’s given, and Sizemore, who is going absolutely nuts in his role as the evil ex of Marissa/hallucinatory devil on Grant’s shoulder. I hate to single a guy out but he’s one of three characters in the whole film and we spend a lot of time with him, so him not being consistently good is a bit of an issue.

Ultimately, this movie is a lot like Boxing Helena to me in that I came for the drama around the film, stayed for the interesting ideas they tried out, and ended up enjoying it. The thing is, I can’t definitively say this deserved better, because this is a film I like and appreciate for what it’s trying to do more than succeeding at; it’s an A for effort and maybe like a B- or C+ for what it actually achieved. It’s a very messy film that doesn’t go far enough, but it does have effort and care put into it that a lot of low budget schlock you can find on Tubi certainly does not. If you’ve got 80 minutes to kill and want to see a weird, low budget drama with a dash of the surreal, you could do worse than this. You could do better, obviously, but maybe you want to see if this deserved more than $30 at the box office. I sure think it did.