Review #348: The Recall (2017)

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #21 - The Recall (2017)

Watch it here on Amazon Prime Video!

The Recall follows a group of friends on a trip out to a rented lake house for Labor Day weekend, when the world is approached by aliens intent on abducting and experimenting on as many humans as they can get their hands on. With the help of a hermit that turns out to be an ex-astronaut that dealt with the aliens before, these friends have to fight for survival- while also fighting against their personal demons.

The Recall is... interesting, it really went some directions I didn't expect it to. It starts off like your typical horror film with some twenty-somethings going out to the woods, they run into a creepy hermit who you think is a bad guy but turns out to be a good guy, and then weird stuff starts happening. But the part that felt most like the typical "horror climax" of the film happens about thirty minutes in, and then it just keeps going. I guess let me use this opportunity to mention something that has bothered me about a handful of movies and I've never had a good place to bring it up.

I'm inventing something I'm calling the "GUM"- "Gabe's Unbelievability Moment". It's an issue that comes up when a movie does something that feels unearned given the pacing of the movie so far, and/or goes a bit too far to be believable in that moment, so it takes me out of the movie. To give an example from another movie I reviewed this month, the movie Heart Eyes has a moment pretty early on where the scene takes place in the main character's apartment, and in the middle of the scene the main character realizes that the killer is hiding in her closet. Once discovered, the killer attacks, the protagonists run away, and then they encounter the killer again and again for the rest of the movie.

The problem was that this was literally the first time the protagonists ever encountered the villain, so we hadn't been given enough time to adjust to the idea that the protagonists have been targeted, and also there's the fact that somehow this killer got into the main character's apartment (and closet) without having any prior knowledge of the protagonist and without being noticed. None of this is inherently a problem with the film, but the fact that it happens so quickly and so early, for me personally, my gut reaction is to assume the whole thing is a dream sequence or something because it's gone just over the threshold for believability. (Think of it like a "Jump the Shark" moment, but in a movie rather than a long-running TV show.) If this happened later in the film, I wouldn't have had issue, but since it happened so early, it screwed up the pacing for me. And maybe that was intended by the filmmakers, but it took me out of the film.

What does this have to do with The Recall? Well, like I said, The Recall felt like it reached the typical climax of the typical film about 30 minutes into the movie. There was a scene where one character accidentally shoots another character, and the second character dies almost immediately. If this happened around the 50-minute mark, or after a lot of the horror action had taken place, I'd be on board. But because of when it happened (as well as the fact that a couple characters had begun acting very strange around this point), I immediately started thinking that the stakes of this scene didn't really matter. Maybe the characters were being mind-controlled by the aliens and this was all some sort of an illusion or something. (Which, actually, might have been true; I'm not sure.) The fact that the character who was shot died so quickly and so little time was spent grieving over the mistake that led to their death, made me assume this character was going to come back to life somehow later. (And, spoilers- I was right!) I just think that the pacing of a movie is a lot more important than most people think, and having one event that upsets your expectations earlier or later than it should, can really remove the tension from a scene. If I don't think the events of a scene are actually happening (at least not in the way they're being presented), then why should I feel scared by the scene? It's like the (factually untrue) saying about boiling a frog: you need to gradually turn up the heat, or my investment is going to jump out of the pot.

This movie feels like it was a jumble of ideas and not all of them gelled the way they should have. (Also: I think the title got changed late in development? One of the last scenes of the movie has someone refer to the main characters as "The Returned", but the movie is instead titled "The Recall". Looking on IMDB there appear to be several other movies from around this time called "The Returned" so I suspect they changed it so as not to conflict.) 

Anyway, overall this movie isn't bad, but I wasn't really crazy about it. It didn't feel like it did much of anything new, and there's a lot that felt was meant to be a significant part of the story but never went anywhere.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Hidden Army Radios

Revealing Mistakes: There's a scene near the end of the film where some characters are driving through the forest, but for all of the interior shots of their car, the editor forgot to digitally add in the background so all of the windows just show a white void. It would have been neat if it was an intentional choice on the part of the filmmakers but I'm certain it was not.