This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Game Night XIV
Plot Overview
Reckless app developer Matias (Colin Woodell) toys with his newfound laptop, cracks its password, and runs Spotify and Papaya (“This thing runs so much faster than my old piece of crap.”) He contacts his deaf girlfriend Amaya DeSoto (Stephanie Nogueras) on Skype—linked through an ASL translator site—to boast, “I got a new laptop.” She is not impressed with his ASL fluency. She's miffed at him for not pursuing the class in signing. Relationships are difficult between deaf-mutes and the hearing & speaking who cannot sign.
Meanwhile one of his online chat buddies A.J. (Connor Del Rio) cautions him, “The Internet as you know it is just the surface.” Matias discovers a hidden directory and asks A.J. does he, “know how to reveal hidden fields?” Showing up onscreen and on our gaydar is a couple of lesbos, one of them sporting (“BAM!”) a new engagement ring. That sign is understood by all. Nari (Betty Gabriel) had hidden it in the milk-laced tea of Serena (Rebecca Rittenhouse.) She had to fish it out just as Matias had to grope for the password. But once she had it it was an easily recognizable sign of something. Just as Matias & Amaya need to sign something to each other.
The plot folds in on itself displayed on a multi-tasking screen where sinister characters going by Charon #? come out of the woodwork to play their own twisted game.
Ideology
What we have here is a troika: the WEB (connected to a dark web); a recently engaged mixed-race couple; and a hearing handicapped partner in a relationship with one who is only beginning to sign. The WEB is qualified as having hidden depths, but then so does marriage & relationships. Concerning marriage I'll quote Dr. Ide: “The contemporary Christian standard was defined not by the bible but generated by Roman law as defined by the jurist Modestinus who argued that marriage was ‘consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani iuris communicatio: a life-long partnership, and a sharing of civil and religious rights’” (83–5). The civil rights are mediated by the state, and the religious rites by the church.
According to cultural historian David Hackett Fischer, it was the Puritans who had “a cultural idea of marriage that was unique to the Puritan colonies. … The Puritans of New England rejected all the Anglican ideas. They believed that marriage was not a religious but a civil contract” (77). Denominationally, Puritanism survives best today in the United Church of Christ. However, for secularized marriage rites, we'd be hard pressed to beat the Universal Life Church from whom online buddy D.J. Lexx (Savira Windyani) has just received by mail his ordination papers. He tells the newly engaged lesbians, “I can totally marry you.” Okay.
Unfortunately Serena's mom is laid up in the ICU undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer, so she can't get out to come to their wedding and she might not live. Their solution is to plan to have their wedding in the ICU and have Lexx preside. Bravo!
A legislator in my neighboring Washington state passed an ordinance allowing same-sex marriage because the words “I'm entering a domestic partnership in the morning” don't have the same ring to them as does “getting married.” I heard on the news S.F. gays singing in the background about “getting married in the morning,” using “Get Me to the Church on Time” for a gay musical number, but churches in Washington at least are exempt from a requirement to perform same-sex weddings. The gay rights activists I've talked to said they'll just cherry pick a church that will go along with it should they desire a religious ceremony. Here they've got the right church and the right venue to get to the ICU on time, the place where disease is being aggressively treated, as it was an aggressive campaign at first to legalize same-sex marriage in Washington.
Finally, in 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the various states' bans against same-sex marriage was pseudo-unconstitutional—marriage isn't actually mentioned in the Constitution. Quoting from the Catholic Sentinel (15):
The main opinion recognized in several places the role of religious beliefs in the questions surrounding same-sex marriage. Kennedy said toward the conclusion of his 28-page opinion that “it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned.”
The First Amendment ensures protection for religious organizations and individuals as they seek to teach the principles “that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths,” he continued, and to “their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons.”
So what we have here is Massachusetts, the home of the Puritans, starting the legalization of same-sex marriage, spread to other New England states and to New York and Washington D.C., where culturally just the legal level need be considered. Judicial activism spread it to other states as well on the legal level. Where the people got to vote, or to use their legislatures, same-sex marriage was disallowed, we suppose under influence of religious and/or traditional considerations. In Washington State where it was aggressively promoted, it passed barely. Tradition speaks loudly in the rest of the country outside of the northeast; in Wash. it was money speaking through external influences. In our movie dark forces set it up so Serena had to choose between the life of her “fiancée” and that of her mother. Tough choice. Per the metaphor we either have tradition (mom) or same-sex marriage (Nari), but we can't have them both.
Amaya tries to come to Matias on the underground to meet at the place
in the park where they shared their first kiss.
It doesn't work. They're on two different
planes. The first kiss was between Adam and Eve. God made
them Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. That's the way marriage works,
(Matt. 19:4-5) “that he which
made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For
this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to
his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.”
Production Values
This horror flick, “” (2018) for its similar material is a sequel to “Unfriended” (2014.) It was written and directed by Stephen Susco. It stars Rebecca Rittenhouse, Betty Gabriel, and Chelsea Alden. A somewhat limited cast in a computer-confined setting held its own quite well. The laptop and Apple computers, through which the whole movie seemed to be filtered, used seemingly real websites and apps: Google, Facebook, Spotify, Skype, Wikipedia, and Bitcoin. Computer sounds got mixed in where appropriate.
MPAA rated it R for some disturbing violence, language and sexual references. If computers themselves frighten you, it will be even scarier. At least it's not overly long.
Review Conclusion w/ Christian Recommendation
It used the conceit of two
couples in relationships: one was heterosexual in which one partner
was deaf and dumb; the other was a mixed-race homosexual couple.
If the homos would have been heteros, they may have had societal
pushback for threatening to corrupt a pure racial line. If the
heteros had been homos, they may have had an easier time at communication
sans words, being alike in thinking per their sex. That these couples
have different dynamics on account of their sexual orientations
would lead one to expect different labels, i.e. marriage as opposed to, say, domestic
partnership or civil union. Trying to merge
them into one concept on the legal level but neglecting the
traditional/religious one is played off against a computerized connection
that beings in dark forces from its sub-levels. It's a tightly wound
metaphor I'm not sure everyone can appreciate, but for what it's worth
I pointed out its salient points. This one was scary in a way most horror
movies are not. See it for the horror, not for the romance.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Decent action scenes Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age Video Occasion: Fit For a Friday Evening Special effects: Well done special effects Suspense: Don't watch this movie alone Overall movie rating: Five stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture taken from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
The “Catholic Sentinel” of July 3, 2015.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's
Seed: Four British Folkways in America.
New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print, WEB.
Ide, Arthur Frederick. Noah & the Ark: The Influence of
Sex, Homophobia and Heterosexism
in the Flood Story and its Writing. Las Colinas:
Monument Press, 1992. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org