I often find that the best horror movie viewing experiences come from a movie I have no expectations for. The less I know about the plot or what fans and critics have said about it, the more likely it is that I might have one of those special movie nights when something really speaks to you. With horror, going in blind can just help me be in the right mood to be scared. I donāt want to hear complaints about jump scares right before I watch a movie with a bunch of jump scares!
It was with this in mind that I randomly selected Nesting Dolls (2019) to watch from Prime one night. The synopsis had me at āsorority girlsā and the trailer looked slightly art-y so I went with it. Well friends, it turned out to be one of the most unhinged movies I have ever seen. If youāre the kind of person who cracks under the pressure to make a decision, man are you going to hate this movie.
Hereās the trailer:
Itās the typical horror movie setting of a group of friends spending time at an isolated lake house. Whatās not typical is that there are three female leads and barely any men in this movie. Itās also not typical that one of the characters gets killed off before the halfway point (sorority prank gone wrong). What seems like it should be the most horrible, climactic moment of the film is just the first stop on the expressway to rock bottom for these girls. Thereās still the matter of how far they would go to not get caught. Especially when it turns out they didnāt actually kill their sorority sister! Whoops!
The last decade or so has turned the deranged sorority girl into a meme. Theyāre cultish. Theyāre obsessed with perfection. And theyāre not afraid to write you pages long emails screaming at you until they get what they want. I donāt think Iāve seen a depiction of a sorority girl in recent memory that wasnāt supposed to be satire, or the object of a joke somehow. It seems like a super intense niche subculture that is actually perfect for depiction in horror except that itās been preceded by such a glut of bimboified sorority girls that theyāve become a dead giveaway of b-horror. But you could never get a movie this dark with bimbos.
Nesting Dolls isnāt like that. None of these girls are presented as bimbos. Though they drink and talk about sex, the girlsā weekend seems like it would have been pretty boring if someone hadnāt been kind-of murdered.
Itās what happens here, in the aftermath of the almost-murder that makes the movie unhinged. It just keepsā¦ going on and on. Itās hard not to scream at the TV and tell the girls what to do. Once they realize their friend is still alive, they have to decide whether to save her or whether to make sure she can never tell anyone what happened.
Nesting Dolls is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. 
