The Super is a 2018 horror film about a man who becomes the superintendent of a large New York City apartment building where people mysteriously go missing.
I generally avoid using the word ‘generic’ when it comes to writing reviews, simply because it feels like a lazy way to describe the efforts of people who certainly must have tried to make a good movie experience. Perhaps I’m getting crusty to horror flicks yet it’s the only word that kept coming to mind while watching Stephan Rick‘s latest chiller The Super, where even its title feels half baked. This is a film that has little to offer for the genre, barely any imagination or creativity to speak of, and is lacking most of the very thing it works to generate: fear. Some are going to herald this for everything it thinks it is, but most I’m sure will find it a disappointment.
Phil Lodge (Patrick John Flueger) is a former cop and widower, now a single father of two young girls, Violet (Taylor Richardson) and Rose (Mattea Conforti). He’s looking to make a fresh start, as one might do, taking a job as the new superintendent for a New York City apartment building. On the staff with him are Julio (Yul Vazquez) and Walter (Val Kilmer), he the eldest of the lot who actually lives in the boiler room. What’s of note about the building, and why the owner is pleased with Phil’s background, is the strange number of disappearances, though it’s not long before Phil learns why. The place is haunted, a disturbing supernatural force at work that soon enough comes after he and his girls.
Written by John J. McLaughlin, whose acclaimed Black Swan and Hitchcock lay a certain expectation to his work, The Super is anything but celebratory, moving along a straight path that ticks all the boxes while trying too hard to throw off its audience. Rick avoids setting up much mystery, giving his ultra long set up at the start plenty of landmarks we’ve seen before in establishing the building’s creepy menace. Sure, it looks sort of good, Rick not at all a slouch in his horror direction, but there’s nothing all that significant in seeing characters we don’t know anything about get pulled into the dark like so many times before.
Granted, that very familiarity kind of plays to the best of it, with a sense that the filmmakers know exactly what they are doing, purposefully playing with the same old deck, but unfortunately, even for the newly initiated to the genre, there isn’t much to make it work. This is compounded by Kilmer who does what he can but feels miscast, not all too convincing as the ultra creepy bottom dweller babbling about in the bowels. I would have liked him much more in the lead.
There’s a lot tossed at us as things meander to its rushed ending, the film never all that sure what to do with its many corners. The cast is game and there’s plenty of potential in the plot, though this kind of twist is a hard sell. I appreciate Rick’s efforts and even took to some moments that had genuine suspense. It’s just too bad they didn’t last and got lost in everything else. Recommended for diehards only.