I'm not sure when the last time was I saw a movie that did so well, 95% of the time...and then they mess it up at the end. I won't go into the major plot too much, but suffice it to say that this film does an excellent job building tension between the couples, a weird intimacy between the female leads, and a sense of "what are they capable of, exactly?" thoughts about the mysterious couple from below. Unfortunately, it builds to an incredibly predictable climax. Oh, the mysterious couple? Run-of-the-mill murderers / baby thieves. They do an excellent job hiding the crime (with one glaring exception), but otherwise it's just a dull, been-there-done-that "shocking" ending. The quotes are due to the fact that this movie contains a blankly starring, dead inside female lead, "the Governor", and lots of marital strife. And this movie is labeled as a thriller, so you know someone is dying. So, not shocking, because the ending is as you'd expect it for the genre. I could excuse most of the predictability due to strong acting performances, except a huge plot hole. We the audience, are to accept that Justin was lead to believe at the end his baby drowned, Okay fine. But the movie implies the killer dropped a bundled up cat in the baby basket in the river, a completely still river. There's no way divers wouldn't dredge the entire length of it looking for a baby or the body. The river was absolutely still and Justin arrives moments after the bundle is dumped. Divers would've found it. I think the investigation would quickly change to a murder investigation if they found a drowned cat in the bundle, or even just cat hairs and no human remains, don't you think? There's no way on Earth it's assumed the baby washed away, without looking, especially for a distraught (but it's implied intelligent) father. So, that major gap in logic created a convenient/predictable "bad" ending, ruining a otherwise excellent film.
Review of The Ones Below
