This is a somewhat difficult movie for me to rate. It has two conflicting attributes: one is that it is very well-crafted and achieves I think precisely what it intends to achieve. The other is that I do not think there was almost a single moment of the entire movie where I enjoyed myself at all.

I have been watching a lot of horror movies lately for whatever reason (including the review coming up after this one), and many of them have very different ideas about how to achieved the desired effect of creating anxiety and "fear" in the viewer. I think that of them, this one is by far the best at it, and it is mainly due to the fact that it is very easy to imagine these people existing in real life, and behaving basically as they do. I think we all know people with some of the tendencies of each of the main characters (hi, yes, you).

And the slow build-up of extreme concern for where things are leading is hard to ignore. It is very rare for me to watch a movie and be genuinely alarmed by the possible upcoming events of the film, but this one achieved it. And it isn't fun! But that's probably the point of horror movies, I think. At least, this subgenre of horror movie, rather than "actually just a comedy, but horror-y" subgenre. And then there is the ending, which I admit surprised me, something that also doesn't happen much in movies, especially horror movies which are almost universally directly telegraphed all movie long.

The movie did drag a little through the middle, and I'm not sure every scene was really necessary. A lot of them just repeated the same "point" and could have been trimmed even further, but to a certain degree I'm willing to attribute this to some of the standards of making movies; it is already at a nice 90 minutes, and the fact is no one makes movies that are only an hour long, because for whatever reason they feel audiences will reject them. Maybe they're too close to television episodes at that point. But if this movie was only 75 minutes it'd probably have been better.

Score: 7/10

IMDb: Poison for the Fairies

PS: I'm sure every single person who has ever watched this movie has commented on the Peanuts-style "adults are not allowed to show their faces, because this movie isn't about them" choice in the cinematography, but that doesn't mean it isn't an interesting decision still, and I think it works well to keep things in focus.

PPS: I like this cover art, and hate the cover art that Shudder uses very much.