Sorry if you watched Mirame already in preparation for this week’s write-up, but Guess Who, the first Tubi Original horror/horror adjacent release of 2024, dropped just a few days ago, so that’s what we’re talking about today. If anyone knows where a fella can get Tubi‘s release schedule, hook it up. That would be rad.

Guess Who was directed by Amelia Moses, the writer/director of the 2020 Shudder Original release Bleed With Me (which we have not yet covered on the podcast). Moses did not write this film, though; that credit goes to three people. There are Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin, who have worked on a number of things together (including the TV series Slasher); and Matt Wells, who has never worked with them before. This will become important later.

Here’s the pleasantly spoiler-free plot summary from both Tubi and IMDB: “A family visit turns deadly when a psychotic killer, hiding behind an unusual tradition, shows up with one target in mind.” And, as per the checklist, here are my spoiler free thoughts: I’ve watched the film twice now and I’m still not sure what anything in the first half has to do with anything in the second half. It feels like somebody took two completely different movies and smashed them together, but lost half of each in the process. I have an idea of what’s going on, but none of it is clear, and I am confident in guessing that ambiguity was not at all the point. This needed either a couple more or a couple fewer rewrites. 1/5 Skulls.

Here’s where we dive into the spoilers, so if you want to go see if you can make sense of it all before I break it down, stop reading here and then come back. Let’s start with the plot recap.

Kaitlyn and Michael are a couple on a trip to visit Michael’s home and family, which Kaitlyn has never done. Their visit coincides with a local Mummers Day tradition, which is kinda like the Mummers Day traditions you can learn about on wikipedia, but also kinda not. They stop at a gas station on their way into town and Kaitlyn is mugged while using the bathroom. When they get to Michael’s home, we learn it’s a pretty rundown trailer park in a mostly rundown town where the local factory shut down and destroyed the economy. Kaitlyn meets Michael’s mom Edith, brother Bobby, sister Sofia, and Sofia’s girlfriend Taylor. She also meets Edith’s weed dealer, who she somehow figures out is the person who attacked her in the gas station bathroom just because his face is bruised up. Not much later, a baghead slasher shows up and kills the weed dealer. Kaitlyn learns Michael’s dad committed suicide after the factory closed, and we learn for no reason that Kaitlyn’s mom is also dead. They all go about doing their Mummers Day partying, and the baghead slasher who killed the weed man kills a couple more people after they each have aggressive interactions with Kaitlyn as well. And then the baghead slasher is never seen or heard from again. Ever. Michael’s family drugs and kidnaps Kaitlyn because it turns out her dad was the factory owner who ruined the town, and they’re going to ransom her for revenge and to pay bills. Michael confronts them and tries to save Kaitlyn, but loses his temper and brutally murders Taylor, who is also in on it. Sofia shows up and tells Kaitlyn that Michael has been playing her the whole time, but Michael says no well yes but I really fell in love with you for real. Tale as old as time. Kaitlyn kills Sofia, Michael kills Bobby, Kaitlyn kills Michael, Kaitlyn’s dad shows up with ransom money, Michael’s mom shows up with all her kids dead now, Michael’s mom kills Kaitlyn’s dad, Kaitlyn burns the money, mom burns to death trying to save the money. The end.

Did that start out like a potentially solid, if routine, slasher film and then suddenly morph into a weird thriller drama that careened into chaos with less and less making sense to you as it went along? Because that’s what happened to me watching the film. There are massive holes in the plot logic that I just couldn’t get past.

Let’s start with that baghead slasher that dominates the first half of the film and is then never seen again. To be fair, it is heavily implied that Michael may have been the baghead slasher. The three victims are all people who had wronged Kaitlyn, Michael shows sudden outbursts of homicidal violence, and Sofia suggests that Kaitlyn (and, by extension, the audience) can’t know for sure it wasn’t Michael because the person we assumed was Michael was wearing a mask a good deal of the time. Michael even says at one point that he has killed for Kaitlyn. But we never see him with the baghead mask. His statement about killing for her comes after he has killed Taylor and Michael. There’s no accomplice revealed to support the idea that someone else was in Michael’s mask when we thought it was him. And I’m pretty sure if you constructed a detailed timeline of the events, he would need to be a teleporting time traveler to have pulled it all off.

Also, not to be rude, but the idea that Kaitlyn made it all the way to the end of this movie without knowing it was her dad who owned and closed the factory is preposterous. She and Michael are engaged to be married. He knows her father is a wealthy businessman. She states early on that her father is a terrible person and she has very little relationship with him. They drive right by the closed factory on the way into town. And you expect me to believe that with all those details in place, she never put two and two together that it was her father’s factory until Michael tells her at the end of the film? I get why he wouldn’t bring it up, but she never got suspicious, never asked questions, or did and just bought is bullshit or non-answers? Please.

And that’s why I brought up the writing credits early on. Was this a script the team wrote, and the individual rewrote? Vice Versa? Was it written by one side and purchased by a producer who then hired the other side to shoehorn in some slasher elements for some reason? I don’t know, but it definitely feels like there were two different visions at play here that gelled about as well as cookies and motor oil. And that’s un-get-past-able.

There’s not much else to say here except that I really am sad this wasn’t more of a straightforward slasher, because the three kills we got were all great, very well executed. I was really hoping this would be a nice big slice of familiar pie. Instead it was like expecting custard and getting sour cream.