I’ve been super interested in thriller movies lately. It’s the only thing that really captures my attention and I love them often because they are unpredictable. I was scrolling through Amazon Prime and saw that there was a thriller movie called The Loft which has actors I was familiar with, who rent out a bachelor pad but things take a dark turn... So naturally, I decided to give it a try.
This is a film that shows the flaws of men, caving in to their desires and how it can go wrong. It’s also a tale of friendship and trust. It’s a film with a lot of adult themes which is to be expected since it’s about a group of men that have invested in a place to live out their fantasies away from their normal lives.
It starts with a group of successful men who have been friends for a number of years and then one of them gets the opportunity and idea to rent out an apartment to basically have one night stands.
One day, they go to find a dead girl in the bed and start deducing who the girl is, what happened, and who set them up. The present time is when they are all in the police station, individually being questioned. We then have flashbacks to when they are in the apartment with the dead girl and then further flashbacks piecing together what actually happened.
Here are the spoilers so if you want to skip, go to the next section:
We then find out that the main instigator of this apartment actually knew the girl and broke it off with her the previous night but swears he didn’t kill her. He then becomes adamant that it’s the wives who have found out and sought revenge. As he comes to that revelation, he begins to go dizzy and loses control of his body.
It’s in that moment that we get a further flashback that the friends found the girl previously and that she had committed suicide. One of the guys (who had never used the apartment to cheat on his wife, we shall call him glasses guy) didn’t call the main guy (who is now basically unconscious but still able to talk a bit), because he has decided they should not take the fall for his mess. The remaining four friends then decide to stage the suicide again and handcuff the main guy to the dead girl’s body. He convinces the others to do this by showing video footage of the main guy basically sleeping with their wives/sisters, etc.
While they were staging it before calling the main guy though, the crazy dude (who honestly isn’t really memorable), decides to make it all so much more dramatic by slitting the girl’s wrists and writing a saying in Latin.
When all of that is revealed, the police officer informs one of the guys (let’s call him coat guy as he was always wearing a coat), that the girl didn’t die from ingesting sleeping pills but actually from the slit wrists. Coat guy realises he doesn’t have the girl’s suicide note anymore and basically deduces it was glasses guy that killed the girl because he loved her but she loved the main guy, then staged her suicide to get the main guy to suffer. However, he actually didn’t kill her, but the crazy guy did but accidentally as he thought she was already dead.
*Spoiler end
If you read the plot, you can tell it’s a very complex story. I enjoyed not really knowing “who did it” but the time jumps became frustrating and there were a lot of characters who looked similar which made it a bit confusing. It was unfortunate that it portrayed men in such a bad light because the women were their consensually (most of the time), but it tried to portray it as though the women weren’t doing any wrong even though they knew the men were married.
The ending also seemed a bit too far fetched. The twists and turns were unpredictable, but they didn’t make sense. It seemed to be just to surprise the audience.
Spoiler Start*
I liked that there was an accidental murder as that felt quite real. However, I fail to understand why all the men were too afraid to call the police straight away when they found the body if they had nothing to do with it.
Spoiler End
The acting is pretty good though and the characters are mostly believable. It does happen that people aren’t in love with their spouses anymore, but it’s a shame that they all have the desire to cheat rather than at least one main character being able to confront their life.
I think it’s worth watching as there is an interesting plotline in terms of guessing but I didn’t find any deeper meaning. It does well at wrapping the film up and it’s not a stressful film. Some of the hard-hitting subjects it just scoots over but that doesn’t make it a bad film.
My Rating - 6/10