Maggie Q and Luke Hemsworth are on a tiny island off the coast of Thailand and from all intensive purposes, it is as paradise as one can find. He’s a travel writer/photographer and with their latest jaunt, they may have just found heaven. That is until it becomes hell.
The Death of Me is from the minds of writers Ari Margolis, James Morley III, and David Tish. It starts well enough, with the first two acts that are stunningly compelling. What is real and what is in the minds of our collective protagonists is a constant guessing game after they are given an odd drink at a bar one evening while on their tropical working vacation. Almost immediately, things get hazy. In fact, our film commences with the two awaking in their Air B&B, without a clue as to what they were up to the night before. The entire place is ransacked, with dirt and mud everywhere, even strewn over the flat-screen TV. In fact, Neil (Hemsworth) has to be awoken from his stupor on the bathroom hallway floor.
Meanwhile, her phone and their passports are missing. Neil finds his phone and they start going through pictures and discover there is a two-and-a-half-hour video on his phone. They hook it up to the television and the unthinkable is on there… horrific. Let’s just say that Christine (Maggie Q) will need quite a while to look at her husband the same way again. First thing’s first, they have to get off the island to make their flight back to American on the Thai mainland. They race to the pier, just in time, but strange things are afoot.
Along the way. A typhoon is coming, but no one on the island is concerned. There is a festival going on, that was not on any travel website that Neil researched that has their cabbie take a different way. They think they’re being robbed. So, the cabbie kicks them out of the cab. They walk the rest of the way and when they arrive—no dice. No passport, no travel. Ferry leaves, the couple remains.
Hemsworth and Maggie Q are terrific together and make quite a commanding pair. The way that they come together after that horrific video and everything else that is being thrown at them in this dream turned nightmare. The people of the village are eager to help, especially an ex-Pat who owns the Air B&B, played by Alex Essoe. But as this is a tiny island filled with souls who seem to have an agenda, each pleasantry is received with a guarded glow by our couple.
Maggie Q truly carries the movie, she is in practically every scene and is in many ways the focus of the film. As she descends into madness and horror, she does so ever so slightly and believably. It is a solid performance from a veteran actress who deserves more strong parts than she’s been given (Fantasy Island, anyone?). Hemsworth continues his hot streak after his stellar work on HBO’s Westworld. He is the comforting husband through and through, yet when nefarious elements start to work their magic on the couple, he too changes in increments that all lead up to the most shocking of character endings.
The screenwriters have crafted a biting horrific statement on tradition, and indigenous respect. But, by the close of the second act, The Death of Me goes to places that had me rolling eyes and seemed more silly than scary. The film kind of went off the rails and failed on a promise that it established in the first two acts. It appears as if they may have run out of ideas of how to continue this piercing speeding train that runs out of tracks. What occurs is not necessarily terrible, it just is not worthy of what has come before it.
Grade: C+