Long Lost is a 2019 mystery about a man who gets an invitation to spend the weekend in the country with his half-brother and his fun-loving girlfriend.
Sex sells, or so we’re told. It’s at least what pulls most of us into a theater given the skin on the poster and the lasciviousness of a trailer. How many erotic thrillers were there in the 80s and 90s crowding screens and video rental shelves before the internet forever changed that landscape? A lot. Now with streaming services all the thing, it’s here where they find home, and the latest on Amazon is Long Lost from debut director Erik Bloomquist, a quasi-thriller with a sexual hang-up that dangles all kinds of curiosity and intrigue but ultimately flails about on its own hook, dismantling its potential long before its over.
Seth (Adam Weppler) arrives at the stately home of older step-brother Richard (Nicholas Tucci), a man he’s never met before, on invitation. They share a father, and with Seth’s mother recently passed away, the two have only now come to know they exist. Or rather, that’s what Seth believes. He soon finds out that the very wealthy Richard has been keeping track of him for a long time and has purpose behind bringing him to his home. There is also Abby (Catherine Corcoran), Richard’s live-in girlfriend, accomplished in her own right, the two unraveling a weird plan that keeps the consistently confused Seth in a spiral.
We’re meant to be equally confused, the first two acts of Long Lost a downright exhausting display of WTF? before a third that cranks up the peculiar to an all new height. From Richard’s creepy schoolyard antagonism, where grown men play little kid’s games such as ‘Chubby Bunny,’ a word game involving marshmallows and sharks and minnows in the large swimming pool, to Abby’s seeming desperation and desire for Seth, it’s a strange ride, all the while Richard berating his younger step-brother for his lack of direction and ambition.
It’s a tease all the way through, with questions about why Richard is such a looney to whether or not Abby is going to seduce her boyfriend’s brother, and while the film succeeds in putting a creepy wedge between the siblings, it doesn’t quite sustain interest, trying to raise the intrigue with various ‘clues’ supposed to prop up the mystery (including but not limited to a cute dog and a naked Richard playing the piano). These in fact are dead giveaways to a ‘surprise’ that you may not know what it exactly will be but know is coming.
Admittedly, the performances really help this stay afloat with Tucci off his rocker and Wepler a perfect counter in playing the everyman wondering just what the hell is going on. Corcoran is positioned to be the real draw here, with her alluring images and sexualized prominence in the marketing but don’t think this a callback to those skin flick thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct as it’s absolutely not, trying more be a twist on The Game than anything else. This has no sex appeal, never really turning up the heat as it seems to promise.
It’s not a complete failure, the puzzle at the core of this not entirely without some merit, but there is a distracting falseness to it that keeps it unreachable.You’ll certainly want to know where it’s going if you’re able to swallow the crazy pill from the start, though you’ll most likely never feel drawn into a movie that uses flashlight tag as a way to conjure up some jumpscares and then … well, you’ll see.
This is a movie that relies entirely on one character doing and following a very specific set of actions that if were to be different in any way would never allow the script to work. And a finale that tries hard to be clever and perhaps offer some commentary on a certain corner of entertainment but doesn’t have the shock it intends, mostly because everything up to that moment feels so purposefully contrived already it feels like one of these characters should have picked up on it far earlier than when they do.