"THE DESERVING" (2024) Is A Misguided Attempt At Playing With Serial Killer Tropes (REVIEW)

Every filmmaker has that moment when the lightbulb goes off and they come up with the “idea” that will set their film apart from countless others in the genre. It can work masterfully like in M. Night Shyamalan’s “THE SIXTH SENSE” or catastrophically like M. Night Shyamalan’s “THE HAPPENING.” It’s good to listen to your creative voice but when that voice is drowning out reason, coherence, and logic, you need to tell that voice to shut up. This is one of the main issues with Koka Singh Arona’s “THE DESERVING”, but to be fair there are so many things wrong with this film. The irony here is that for a film about a mute serial killer the voice making all the wrong decisions is all you can hear.

Venkat Sal Gunda stars as Carter, the aforementioned mute serial killer who seems to be a famously well-known photographer who specializes in headshots. This provides an endless stream of young female models and actresses knocking at his door for his expertise. We learn early in the film that he dispatches his victims, leaving them randomly scattered around his house, his torment too much for him to bear he decides today he will end his reign of terror and take his life. After what seems to be a botched suicide attempt Carter is visited by Lucy Hill, played by Simone Stadler, the one bright spot in the production. Lucy loves to talk, the more she says the more she reveals that maybe she knows more about Carter than he’d like, maybe they’ve even met before.

When Lucy mysteriously disappears, we’re left with repetitive scenes of Carter being terrorized by glimpses of his previous victims. The practical effects are not very good but they’re certainly better than the CG used here. There aren’t many of these scenes and they’re thankfully short but along with poor effects, there are glaring plot holes to the point of distraction. It’s never made clear how Carter has achieved his level of (local?) celebrity or if this is part of the fever dream aesthetic the director is going for. This is a frustratingly tired trope that’s used all too often to provide cover for a lack of clarity, coherence, or logic in a film. The choice to make Carter mute is perhaps the most baffling of all. Carter’s lack of dialogue and the amateur way in which Venkat Sal Gunda communicates with others is borderline offensive and don’t think this film will be championed by anyone with a speech disability. Beyond that, the acting is not strong or compelling enough to be engaging. What we’re left with is scene after scene of exasperated pantomime.

This is more of an experiment in film rather than a film itself, an idea of a story rather than a coherent narrative, acting that’s more like class exercises than engaging performances. With these half measures in play the pieces fail to add up to anything resembling a watchable genre film.

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