Red Letter Day (2019)

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Movies

Suburban life turns deadly when some nut jobs decide to enact their own version of The Purge by sending red letters to the members of a community instructing each person to kill the neighbor in each card.

The story follows a recently divorced mother of two as the family receives their red letters and ponders what to do.

The premise was not terrible, and in fact was kind of interesting how some of the people embraced their homicidal urges, while others ignored the red letters until the tensions of the situations started to boil over.

Let’s talk about the quality and budget. This is where the movie really fell short. The acting was not the worst ever, but really detracted from a lot of the scenes (Lewis, I’m looking at you). The overall cinematography had this surreal, almost soap opera feel to it. A lot of these things were really small, but enough of it pulls you out of the action. The blood and gore was mostly really good and had me shuddering at times.

I think this could have been great, but fell short in several areas. It was hard to get past the fact that while all of this was going on there weren’t any first responders coming to arrest people or help victims. The whole thing seemed to be very isolated from the real world. There were many similarities to The Purge, but in that movie, it was a government mandate that enforced the event. Some randos started this “Red Letter Day” and people could have just thrown the letters in the trash and acted like nothing was going on. I get that it’s supposed to be a sociological/psychological experiment, but I’m not sure I agree with the motivations of the characters to partake in the event.

Rating: