Writer: Gary Dauberman
Director: John R. Leonetti
It's 1969 and the Summer of Love is in full swing. Before returning to Boston, Abigail (Henstridge) is thrown a low-key leaving party at a swanky house in the California hills by her heavily pregnant friend Sharon (Cassidy). The festivities are soon curtailed as the house is visited by four psychotic strangers...
The opening of the movie points out that it's "based on a true story" and the major plot points are very close to the events of the actual Manson family murders that took place around the time. The main characters in the film share their first names with the real-life victims. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, Sharon is pregnant.
If Wolves At The Door were a completely fictional home invasion thriller there would be things to commend it. The leads play the material well, Henstridge in particular is very good indeed and even Campbell, despite being saddled with a distractingly wonky Eastern European accent, comes across as sympathetic and likeable. Technically it's well made and the director knows how to rack up the tension - the first seven or eight minutes, set in a different location the night before the main story begins, are a nicely-judged exercise in escalating panic (there's a phrase to quote out of context on a poster).
My own specific problem - and you may be able to get past this, but I can't - is that I'm not sure I want to watch something that's so closely linked to a tragedy that's still affecting the living to this day and to have it retold as quite a glossy shocker left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. The violence is downplayed quite a bit - some of it happens off-screen, one murder can only be seen in the reflection of a television screen - which on one hand shows a decent amount of restraint but doesn't make it any less horrible, especially if at the back of mind you're, like me, thinking "this actually took place".
Normally I would be complaining about a movie that's so short (it doesn't even make it to an hour and a quarter) but in this case I couldn't wait to get out of the cinema. The source material, for me, isn't the basis for entertainment and the fact that WATD goes for both jump scares and drawn-out suspense sequences just makes it all the more unpleasant to watch. This isn't so much "inspired" by the Manson family killings as it is a reconstruction and in my opinion this crosses a line it maybe shouldn't.
Though there's absolutely no denying the talent on display here both in front of and behind the camera, I find it somewhat troubling when this kind of thing is presented as entertainment. Having said that, I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't go to watch this, just consider yourself forewarned.
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