Quartile rating: 4.5/10 · 1 rating
Disturbing and mysterious things begin to happen to a bartender in New Orleans after he picks up a phone left behind at his bar.
Wounds starts with an intriguing Lovecraftian-adjacent premise rooted in gnosticism and occult dread, but the narrative unravels badly as it progresses. The film fails to build coherent tension from its interesting source material, leaving character motivations muddled and the central mystery frustratingly opaque in an unsatisfying rather than provocatively ambiguous way. Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson deliver serviceable performances given the thin material, but neither is given enough to work with. The cinematography captures New Orleans' humid atmosphere competently without being distinctive. The ending is the film's biggest failure — it abruptly stops rather than concludes, offering neither cathartic horror nor meaningful ambiguity, feeling like an incomplete thought. The cockroach and phone imagery flirts with originality but the execution is too derivative of better cosmic-horror works to feel truly singular.