The idea of the Final Girl defiantly fighting back against the villain in horror is a storied one; indeed, said Final Girl giving back just as much as she is getting is one of the great traditions of the genre. From A Nightmare On Elm Street and Halloween through Scream and You’re Next up to recent gems such as Terrifier 2, the concept of brutality being met with brutality…wholly satisfying. Mary Beth McAndrews’ Bystanders is a film that asks, ‘what if the victims were the original killers?’ and takes it to the extreme.
Abby is on cloud nine. Her crush, the rich and handsome frat boy Cody, has invited her to a party with her friends and his, and at first it seems like love is in the air and all is right in the right. Alas, Cody’s true intentions soon rear their ugly head: he and his friends intend to rape and murder Abby and her friends. Worse, it’s not the first time they’ve done it and they’ve worked out a system through their parents’ connections to get away with it all. Running for her life, Abby runs into Clare and Gray, a seemingly normal couple on their way home from a wedding. Soon, the tables are turned, and Abby is the witness to a parade of violence and bloodshed as Clare and Gray give Cody and his friends’ gallons and gallons and gallons of their own medicine.
This is not an easy film to watch. While much of the sexual violence is implied or happens offscreen, the male antagonists seem to have a vocabulary consisting almost exclusively of derogatory terms for women. It gets really old really quick, and while it is an unfortunately accurate depiction of how the types of men who objectify women speak, it can be a bit much at times. Equally terrifying is the fact that these boys talk and act isn’t really all that fantastic or unbelievable. Unlike a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre where the horror comes from Sally being mocked incessantly by the Sawyers in a bizarrely childish way, the villains in Bystanders just sound like typical college bros discussing women. It’s sickening but effective, a harsh reminder that even though the film might be fiction the attitudes in it are far from fictional.
There’s a welcome sense of class consciousness in the film as well. It’s not just that Cody and his friends see women as disposable objects for their amusement, but also that they see themselves as men of wealth and privilege to be above consequence. They’re not doing this to women in their own demographic. They’re preying upon women they see as people no one will miss or care about. The rich being objectively evil isn’t exactly an original message in a horror film but it’s certainly not one I’ll ever disagree with, and McAndrews’ depiction of frat boys (let’s just be honest) being slightly more awful than frat boys already are is an all too believable story of the rich believing they play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. The realization of the various characters that their money and family connections don’t mean shit to people who simply want them dead in the most painful ways possible is…mwah. Delectable.
This film doesn’t have much of a plot, and that’s fine. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is, and it doesn’t overextend itself. It’s a satisfying depiction of assholes getting their just due, of toxic masculinity being met with the heavy hand of street justice and the delicious fear of the small fish that believes itself to be at the top of the food chain finding out far too late there are always bigger and badder fish out there.
