Thanksgiving is not known for its horror films. Eli Roth’s latest slasher film hopes to change that.
Set in Plymouth, Mass., in modern times, “Thanksgiving” follows a band of teenaged friends who must learn to survive a killer dressed up as Pilgrim John Carver.
All goes wrong when RightMart owner Thomas Wright (Nick Hoffman) decides to have a pre-Black Friday Thanksgiving Day sale in which he drags his manager to work under threat of termination. The sale works too well, as it creates a mob reminiscent of the days when the unofficial shopping holiday used to draw crowds (thanks to online shopping and overall stinginess of current-day sales, this is no longer the case).
In the midst of this sale, we meet our friend group consisting of Jessica Wright (Nell Verlaque), Thomas’ daughter and our point-of-view character; Gabby (Addison Rae); jocks Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and Evan (Tomaso Sanelli); Jessica’s boyfriend, Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) and Yulia (Jenna Warren), who has a well-off Russian father.
Jessica and company manage to sneak into the store and they tease the mob, who eventually storm the store in a violent rampage that kills several people, forcing Plymouth Sheriff Eric Newton (Patrick Dempsey) to fire his weapon.
We then jump a year into the future. Bobby has disappeared from school, having broken his throwing arm (he’s a baseball player) in the mob attack. Jessica has replaced him and has started dating his rival, Ryan (Milo Manheim), who has a thoroughly wooden performance and comes off as a wannabe Miles Teller, but the friend group has otherwise remained intact.
Our equilibrium is disrupted when someone dressed as Carver starts killing people involved in the RightMart incident. He is relentless, his kills are creative especially in the way he uses the Thanksgiving theme and he is almost entirely unpredictable.
By the time it comes to the sheriff’s attention, several people are dead and he and the friend group are three steps behind him, forced to react to each attack.
“Thanksgiving” is a slasher and whodunit with thriller elements, with its mystery of who’s its killer being the most tantalizing aspect of it. It’s also (spoilers) unknowable to first-time viewers, as his motivation is based on off-screen events that are revealed later to us. Still, it skillfully weaves several plausible red herrings that kept me on edge and guessing — each would work fine enough in an inferior picture, but who its killer ultimately ends up being is the only person that makes sense given how competent and careful he is.
The film is keen to make its cast of characters as unlikeable as it can, with Jessica and Bobby being only slightly sympathetic, as they were complacent in the attack but were not particularly mean-spirited, unlike the likes of Evan, Ryan and a waitress named Lizzie (Amanda Barker) the last of whom is among Carver’s first kills and who was among the first wave of deadly rioters. Jessica in particular comes off as someone who fully understands the consequences of her actions and just wants to make it through the year, which is a great foil to her clueless and at-times amoral father.
The film does leave the door open for a sequel, which I would be open to seeing, but it’s not clear if it’ll get a greenlight. It’s already close to doubling its $15 million budget, but it’s not a giant hit and it’s already facing steep competition from “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” and “Napoleon.” The spirit of its namesake holiday will also fade soon as people shift gears into Christmas.
“Thanksgiving” gets an 8.5/10
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