The Ruins
It's a tough call, really. You, your best friend, and your respective boyfriends go all the way down to Mexico for a little fun in the sun. The hotel pool is fine, and your boyfriends are way cute. It's just like being in America except now you're scared to drink the water. Then this German guy (cute, too) comes over and is, like, "You wanna come see these ruins my brother went to and hasn't been heard from since?"
You guys follow him, even though your Spidey sense is totally tingling. Like, why is the path to the ruins all covered up? And why are those indigenous kids staring at you? But you went because your boyfriend wanted to - he's one of those fit, intrepid American med students. And within five minutes one of you is dead and the rest of you are stuck at the top of a big stone temple covered in flesh-eating vines that also burrow beneath the skin.
Jena Malone is the "you" in that scenario for "The Ruins," a surprisingly effective little horror nightmare that opened yesterday without a screening for critics. I jumped legitimately at least twice, covered my eyes during most of the amateur on-site surgeries, and felt the pit of my stomach tighten up once Jonathan Tucker and Shawn Ashmore - as the boyfriends - lowered Malone and Laura Ramsey into the temple's mouth to find a ringing cellphone.
The movie is short, and has about two sets for the actors to slowly lose their minds over. The photography, by Darius Khondji, has dismaying clarity at night. You can see more than you want to. By day, it's beautiful despite the damned in its view. And as the plant bait, Ashmore, Tucker, Ramsey, and particularly the oft-distraught Malone have made it even harder to tolerate dumb, bad acting in other horror movies. The director, Carter Smith, and the screenwriter, Scott B. Smith (he adapted his novel), leave room for these four to make some interesting, realistic psychological choices. Their distress is yours. But hokey plot mechanics abound. One character's demise owes more to horror-movie math than ingenuity or actual necessity.
"The Ruins" has its insults, too. It appears that our luscious white Americans have wandered into some kind of ongoing ritual that the indigenous killer Mexicans have all gathered down below to watch. The movie makes them extra-ugly and extra-incomprehensible. But they have working guns and arrows. They also have their reasons for waiting for the vines to eat the tourists. But no matter how savage things get at the top of the temple, we know the actual primitives are waiting down below - though in pretty nice jeans.
The Americans are predictably entitled. When Tucker addresses the fear that they'll never be found, he says something to the effect of "Four Americans just don't disappear." Watched with a sizable black and Hispanic audience, as I did the other night, that line brings down the house.
The filmmakers have managed some scary-ironic eco-commentary, too - the ringing cellphone punch line is a Greenpeace fantasy, and the vines themselves are a stoner's worst nightmare. This weed wants to smoke you.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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