American director Stewart Thorndike’s horror film is a gender-flipped and queered remix of The Shining, complete with a pair of creepy spectres (joggers this time) and an ominous fixation on a particular hotel room. Ruthie (Glow’s Gayle Rankin) turns up for a weekend break at her mother’s snowbound resort, which she is in line to inherit, with three friends. She, girlfriend Cal and pal Maddie (trans actors Hari Nef, recently seen in Barbie, and Rad Pereira) just want to loll around the pool and have fun. But antsy Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), who mistakenly believed she had cancer, won’t settle down and seems to have designs on Ruthie.
Thorndike couches proceedings in an aura of generalised hipsterdom – Cal is never seen without her Hole T-shirt, while the fluorescent-green title design is purloined from Twin Peaks – that is suffocating for the film’s first 15 minutes. But gradually it becomes apparent that the snide repartee, emanating chiefly from Ruthie, is the result of a kind of emotional constipation that events in the hotel’s pastel corridors seem to be trying to shake loose. While Ruthie is hooked on watching Ted-style talks from a scarlet-suited hospitality guru (Molly Ringwald), strange happenings hint at deeper levels of psychic disturbance: breakfast-lounge denizens manifest themselves to Fran, or a chainsaw-wielding maniac in a hoodie.
