I caught a secret screening of Dolly last night. My 68 year old father is traumatised. I don’t think he’ll ever be the same. I laughed the entire way through.
A cross between In a Violent Nature and the back half of Barbarian. That probably tells you everything you need to know. If it does not, this probably is not your film.
This is not elevated horror, not metaphor for trauma. Not slow-burning dread about grief or capitalism or whatever the discourse is this week. This is something more deranged than that. Forget the quiet stalking through the trees. Dolly is a trapped-in-a-house-with-something-wrong film, and the something wrong is deeply, perversely wrong, and wearing a porcelain mask.
There is Texas Chain Saw Massacre DNA all over it. Not in pacing, but in its bone-deep conviction that the world is cruel and insane and no one is coming to help you. The difference is that TCM had the decency to let its characters try. The characters here make decisions so catastrophically, consistently stupid that you stop pitying them almost immediately. After a while it becomes almost impressive, every choice is the wrong one, and made confidently.
The violence is not subtle, and it is not coy. It goes past shock and into something faintly hysterical, less like choreography, more like someone asking how far they can push this before it becomes absurd. There is a scene involving forced infantilisation that swerves into something so wildly inappropriate and feral that you either recoil or start laughing at the sheer audacity of it. The film does not flinch. It doubles down. That is its frequency.
The budget shows, but so does the nerve. There is no attempt to dress this up as prestige horror, it is ugly on purpose.
The characters are thin. The dialogue is functional. If you came for thematic excavation or psychological layering, you are in the wrong house.
Is it good? Not really.
Did I love it? Absolutely.
Sometimes you just want a slasher that understands the assignment and commits to it with porcelain-faced, utterly unhinged conviction. Dolly knows exactly what it is.
And it swings the shovel hard.
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