Netflix’s horror-thriller Don’t Move is the modern equivalent of a Roger Corman movie

One of the first names you see on screen at the start of Don’t Move, a nifty though rather basic murder-in-the-woods thriller now streaming on Netflix, is Sam Raimi, whose production company is one of the forces behind the movie. Raimi started out directing lo-fi horror like the original Evil Dead trilogy before working his way up to huge hits like the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films and most recently, the MCU’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But rather than using his clout to attach executive producer credits to massive blockbusters, or even arthouse passion projects, Raimi is paying tribute to his roots, doing the honest work of producing lots of low-to-mid-budget genre movies, like Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe, the silly Adam Driver dino vehicle 65, or in this case, a straight-to-Netflix small-scale horror movie.

This kind of small-time film project is a time-honored, important, but not much discussed area of genre moviemaking, existing somewhere between no-budget bootstrapped indies and the boutique-brand identities of the likes of Blumhouse and A24. Producers like Raimi are making simple films on the cheap with young directors and small casts, selling to studios or streamers for a profit, then rolling on to the next one. It reminds me of the work of the legendary Roger Corman, who left no corners uncut on his way to producing literally hundreds of genre movies in a career spanning 70 years.

Corman treated films as product — cheap product, at that — and made few masterpieces, but his quickie budget movies launched the careers of everyone from Martin Scorsese to James Cameron to Jack Nicholson. The history of cinema would not be the same without him.

When I say that Don’t Move is the modern equivalent of a Corman movie, that might make it sound more trashy or exotic than it really is. It’s not some future cult classic. But it is an expedient, efficient piece of filmmaking that does exactly what it needs to do, no more and no less, to exploit one great idea — the terror of being trapped in your own body, unable to move or speak.

Iris (Kelsey Asbille) is a grieving mother taking a walk without her phone in a remote forest. She encounters a stranger (American Horror Story’s Finn Wittrock) who shows her kindness, but then abducts her. She escapes, but as she holds her captor at knifepoint, he reveals that he has injected her with a paralytic drug that will take away her fine motor skills, then her legs, then her power of speech; by the time it takes full effect, she won’t be able to do anything but blink.

That’s an instinctively frightening setup, but a tricky one to dramatize. How do you keep the plot moving when your protagonist can’t? Writers T.J. Cimfel and David White and directors Brian Netto and Adam Schindler have a few cunning answers to this conundrum, including engineering a situation where Iris, with the extremely limited actions available to her, is forced to turn to her abductor for salvation. Out of the fire, back into the frying pan.

There’s an agonizing, inherent suspense to this moment, as well as several others where Iris stares rescue in the face, unable to do anything about it. As her faculties slowly return, it seems like the film’s tension would begin to dissipate — but again, the filmmakers find ways to balance this out and keep Don’t Move’s path from fear to catharsis on a steady, propulsive track.

Don’t Move is a slick, proficient movie, but there’s nothing exceptional about the way it’s been put together, and the filmmakers don’t make much of an attempt to excavate any depth or resonance from its clever setup. Where Corman might have applied a lurid, sensationalist gloss to a functional programmer like this, the 2024 version instead gestures toward a sort of sober, prestige-y emotionality: Iris is haunted by her child’s death, and her would-be murderer is perversely giving her a reason to live again. This gives Asbille something to cling to in her performance, but the story only pays lip service to the idea.

Don’t Move isn’t a film about the paralyzing effects of grief, really — even if its writers perhaps once thought it was. It’s, well, a film about how scary it would be not to be able to move, just like it says in the title. And sometimes — when booting up Netflix on a Friday evening after a tiring week, for example — that kind of efficient delivery on expectations is all you really need.

Don’t Move is streaming on Netflix now.