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First impressions are critical, and I find this especially true when it comes to movies. It takes either real dedication or lack of anything better to do, to commit yourself to an hour and a half of a movie when you find yourself bored out of your mind within the first twenty minutes. Sometimes, it is worth it and you discover something brilliant, albeit a bit slow. Other times, it is absolutely not worth it and all you do is end up wasting two hours of your life that you can never get back. Also, it is important to remember that the reverse could happen, which was the case with Jack Ketchum’s The Lost. Shortly after watching and enjoying Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door I was looking forward to The Lost. The beginning was good and so my expectations for the rest of the movie had reached a standard that, unfortunately, was not met.
The first twenty minutes of The Lost was great. It was intense, shocking and it really pulled me into the film. During this time we are introduced to Ray, a young man who is incredibly charming and terrifyingly creepy at the same time. We see his charm during a flirtation with a girl he just meets and his malice and viciousness when he interacts with his supposed girlfriend Jen. This viciousness is taken to another level when he actually commits murder, clearly for no other reason than his own amusement. This all takes place in the first twenty minutes of the movie, making it hard to walk away. But after sitting through the whole thing, you’re left wishing you had.
After he commits murder, it seems that Ray goes back to his usual way of life. I guess this demonstrates he feels no remorse for the blood on his hands. His two friends who witnessed the killing have sort of fallen apart and have this hopeless aura around them, which makes Ray seem like even more of a monster for being completely at ease with it all. He spends the whole movie showing that he can be both charismatic with girls and then dangerously violent. Ray’s mood swings are really annoying and when he finally loses his mind and goes on a killing spree, I could not help but roll my eyes. It was not that Ray was not scary; Marc Senter performance as Ray was exceptional so it was not his acting skills. It’s just that nothing really comes together in the end. I get it — he was a psychopathic killer who could easily be set off into a violent rage, blah, blah, blah. Psychopaths are scary, Senter was definitely creepy enough, so what happened with The Lost? It builds itself up quite well and pulls you in immediately, but before you know it, you’re interest seems to be more lost than Ray’s supposed morals.
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