“What Happened At 625 River Road?” (2023) chronicles the three days leading up to May 11, 2015 when a brutal crime was committed. Laura (Francheska Pujols) gets more than she expected when she and her best friend, Kelly (Summer Foley), rent a Schenectady home to escape from the stressful city and unwind. The mood of owner, Ms. Johnson (Silvana Jakich), swings wildly, and her younger brother, Tom (Pete Alex Marzecki), glowers silently nearby, but they leave so the young women can enjoy their weekend getaway.
While carefree, bolder, and adventurous Kelly is unbothered, the cautious, tenuous, and responsible Laura cannot shake the feeling that something is off, and she is right.
It makes sense that Laura, an orphan, immigrant, and woman of color, would be more suspicious of her surroundings given the likelihood that Kelly was more sheltered than Laura. Kelly is dismissive of Laura’s concerns even as the disturbances mount and seems less a friend than a person basking in Laura’s admiration and exploiting it so she can have a servant; however, if it seems that the two’s dynamic will act as a microcosm about intersectionality, friendship, gender, and race, think again.
The two dominate the first twenty-four minutes, the tightest section of the film. Debut director Devon Jovi Johnson hits the ground running with evocative montages of their good times, overhead shots of Manhattan punctuated with flash forwards of claustrophobic inducing interrogation rooms introducing various witnesses to the mysterious crime. The premise behind the story is a good one: the meek Laura and her clueless friend against the unhinged Ms. Johnson and her looming, sinister enforcer. There is also a locked door that they forbid Laura and Kelly to enter so the trajectory of “What Happened At 625 River Road?” rests on when the two will disobey the siblings’ order, and all hell will break loose. We love a Bluebeard/Chekhov’s locked door.
Unfortunately, because Johnson’s core story is so clever, he cannot hold himself back from showing his hand too early in the film: a voiceover reveals which friend dies, and scenes with only Ms. Johnson and Tom indicate that they are not who they appear to be. Frequent moviegoers will be able to predict the various plot twists after that point so the remaining scenes start to leak tension and get in the way of staying invested until the end. Johnson can write amazing dialogue and never makes the mistake of films like “Holistay” (2023) of creating inane, tedious conversations that are realistic, but enervating. There is one scene where the two friends are discussing movies, specifically “Swordfish” (2001). The content of their dialogue may seem insignificant, but it reflects the tenor of their relationship and reveals their inner psychological life. That light, seemingly insignificant dialogue needed to appear more in the remainder of “What Happened At 625 River Road?” to sustain viewers’ investment in the two instead of every waking moment devoted to concern about their surroundings.
“What Happened At 625 River Road?” also loses momentum when it shifts its attention from the location to Detective Nickels (Matrell Smith), an engaging, affable character, but not interesting enough to carry the movie on his own. The longer that he is on the screen, the more opportunity for fans of “Law & Order” to spot the flaws in the detective’s part of the story. His encounter with Laura will also give away plot twists to eagle-eyed viewers. When Johnson introduces additional characters and moves the action to another location, a New York night club, it further dilutes the narrative’s impact. A denouement flashback reveals that one of the two supporting characters introduced at the club is pivotal to the story, but he barely gets any screen time. Tertiary characters supplement revelations about the quality of Laura’s character but feel redundant and add little to the story.
It becomes obvious that every interrogation scene seems more concerned about Laura than the malicious siblings, whom Johnson sympathizes with by showing flashbacks of their childhood. He had not considered that this empathetic response to their financial anxiety would let the air out of an ending that is supposed to be cathartic and triumphant for more than a beat, especially since the entire movie is building up to the point when the tables are going to turn. Instead, Johnson denies viewers the time to relish the moment before rushing to the next revelation to recontextualize it into a moment of disapproval without considering that if the siblings’ plans were not interrupted, an innocent person would die. Johnson may have consciously intended for Laura to be the hero, but his subconscious was rooting for the siblings and prevented him from thinking about the implications if no one put the brakes on their shared, unhealed childhood trauma-motivated malfeasance.
Johnson is starting at the top of the board in terms of visuals and already establishing a signature style. He puts weaker directors with more resources and experience to shame. His camerawork looks expensive, especially the cityscape shots, and the film is at its strongest in the daytime. The location features a house that looks ominous and mysterious from the outside and at the threshold, but as Laura and Kelly enter, it flips to gleaming, stark white. The editing is phenomenal with quick intercutting between locations or jumping back and forth in time to reflect the frayed nerves of the siblings or Laura’s internal conflict. He also borrows some Ari Aster transitions with rapid cuts from night to day with the snap of a finger. Exterior nighttime shots, especially with the shadows, are unpredictable, but the interior nighttime shots suffer from the same issues that plagued “Game of Thrones”: home viewers may have a hard time discerning what is unfolding.
Once Johnson’s storytelling skills match his filmmaking talent, he should be unbeatable.
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“What Happened At 625 River Road?” is “Identity” (2003) meets “Influencer” (2022) except instead of being a sociopath, Laura is clinically insane. The film features two versions of Kelly. Laura murdered the real Kelly before her trip to 625 River Road, but the authorities mistook it as an accident. Johnson only shows the real Kelly at the beginning and end of the movie. It is not obvious that the opening, joyful montages are from the past, not the present or after the events at 625 River Road, which is a clever shell game that Johnson delivered on. At the end of the movie, Johnson begins where the opening beach scene ended and depicts how Laura remembers the day of Kelly’s death contrasted with what really happened. Laura imagines that Kelly slipped during an argument, and Laura tried to pull her back up, but Laura was jealous that Kelly had a boyfriend and tossed her off the rocks. Later, the boyfriend commits suicide out of his grief.
The Kelly of Laura’s imagination, the bad side of Laura that she tries to suppress, is the one who accompanies Laura to the mysterious house. The wardrobe choices helped portend this development. Alter ego Kelly wears black, and Laura wears lighter colors until Laura starts giving in to her impulses. So the nightclub scene is part of Laura’s delusion. Laura hallucinates seeing Laura’s boyfriend as a random clubgoer that Kelly makes out with, which recreates the jealous dynamic that played out in real life at the beach. It feels like a waste to have such a dramatic story line and have Kelly’s boyfriend appear two times, on the beach and in Laura’s hallucination, commit suicide, yet know nothing about him. He may not even get a line of dialogue. Either he should not have committed suicide, or he needed to play a more important role in the story.
When Laura arrives at the house, she unwittingly interrupts the siblings, who have the owner of the titular home tied up in the basement because they want to take back their childhood home, which their father lost when the bank foreclosed. Even though the siblings know that Laura is not well, they think that they can deal with her since she is outmatched two to one; however, they do not know that she is a murderer, and this moment would have been a payoff for attentive viewers. It should have been a cathartic and rewarding moment to finally find out that the woman from the first interrogation room scene is the real Mrs. Johnson (Lisa Panagopoulos). I wish that the movie devoted more time to Mrs. Johnson being grateful, and Detective Nickels and the other cops treating Laura like a hero. Instead, it rushes towards the next sensational event thus making it feel like a forgotten afterthought. It was a mistake to introduce a new cop and place Laura in the cop car as a perp so she was triggered to kill again. Even though Johnson sets up Laura as the main character, he does not set her up to be an anti-hero. He hates what she did to the siblings.
I had an opportunity to talk to Johnson, and he confirmed my suspicion, that the siblings would have killed Mrs. Johnson, but during the making of the film, he did not think about that scenario and subconsciously did not see Laura’s actions as a rescue because the foreclosure is a gut punch moment. In a vacuum, if I had not talked to Johnson, I would have mistakenly wondered if it was some New York Times moment where the only concern is shown for the humanity of Presidon’t supporters, not their victims. So even though the whole film sets up a scenario of tables turning and an unlikely underdog stopping a crime, the execution does not feel like it. There is no uplifting moment. It is just dread and a tragedy because Laura gets away, and the siblings are just her next innocent victims, whereas I only think of real Kelly as an innocent victim. Also, did Laura kill her parents?
“What Happened At 625 River Road?” could have had its cake and eaten it too with a few tweaks. After Laura gets the hero treatment, Detective Nickels offers his hospitality to Laura. He gets a call after they see the surveillance footage and/or a call from Dr. Lloyd Dickenson, playing himself. He tries to detain her, and then she kills him. That way there is an emotional payoff for both plot twists. I have no issue with a movie that has nothing but horrible people and no one to root for, but the film is fractured. Its agenda is to get viewers to root for Laura, but Johnson’s heart is not in it so there is no emotional payoff for the investment as there is in “The Usual Suspects” (1995) for having the bad guy get away with it.
Horror is usually rooted in social anxiety or real-world problems. Images matter, and even if it is unintentional, optics can perpetuate subconscious beliefs and biases. “What Happened At 625 River Road?” is part of an emerging trend of thrillers/horror cautionary tales of the psychotic woman friend/villain who wants to destroy love versus the nice woman who still believes in love and is in a good relationship. “Influencer” is not a one-off. It is an unofficial, visceral response to a growing global movement of women decentering men and heterosexual traditional romantic relationships at the expense of themselves. South Korea’s 4B Movement is probably the most explicit example of this movement. It went from being a joke about cockblockers at the club disrupting a potential connection, but now these women are becoming memorable villains. The psycho best friend attacking her guileless best friend is replacing the psycho women attacking men in movies like “Fatal Attraction” (1987). Laura’s one night stand makes sense as a demerit against Laura’s character and helps viewers understand that Kelly is a part of her personality. Earlier Laura made a move on imagined Kelly. Laura is a queer-coded villain. She also falls into the sensible hero/skimpy villain trope by beginning to merge her two sides at the club by wearing skimpier clothes and picking up strangers.
The shift to Detective Nickels’ apartment permits a moment for him to listen to a television news broadcast about the fictional Manhattan Freedom Redemption Bill that releases people confined in psychiatric hospitals. Horror films often use insane asylums as starting points of chaos, especially when someone is released on an innocent world. Movies featuring people with split personalities, i.e. dissociative identity disorder, like “Split” (2017), enforce the inherent implicit bias that people with mental health diagnoses are dangerous. Also during the Reagan Eighties, the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 led to the closing of mental health institutions, which led to an increase in homelessness and incarceration of those with higher support needs. The impact in New York and other major cities was dramatic with evocative images of raving, disheveled people in the street, which is alluded to in these news clips. Laura is a natural byproduct of this shared fear that people have of those who suffer from mental health issues. The diagnosed may not be more dangerous than the undiagnosed, but they are perceived as such.
Laura, who is from the Dominican Republic and dark-skinned, also falls into the trope of the inherently dangerous immigrant. Presidon’t may be its loudest proponent of demonization, especially for anyone from South America, but it is a proud American tradition codified in xenophobic laws probably predating the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Her opening monologue talks about not belonging and being an orphan, but once “What Happened At 625 River Road?” establishes that she is a psycho killer, she validates this exclusion.
It is unclear whether Laura identifies as a Black woman, but she presents as such. She also appears to be the only Black woman in “What Happened At 625 River Road?” There is no point in the film where race arises as an issue except when Detective Nickles bemoans the fact that he is the only Black person in the area. While the camaraderie between Nickles and Laura was a missed opportunity-there is not a single scene where he expresses his excitement over seeing another person of color instead of a white woman, which was what he expected, it points to the elephant in the room: that Laura is the only one whereas Nickles at least has one other coworker.
Black actors want opportunities to play villains and not be restricted into respectable roles because they deserve to explore the full range of human experiences, but many people of color, especially Black people, have the burden of knowing that though Black people are not a monolith, the behavior of one often gets attributed as if Black people were. Only having one Black woman character carries over the weight of that unspoken burden from the real world into the imaginary even if it is never considered as part of the storyline. So if the only Black villain in “What Happened At 625 River Road?” is a Black woman, it carries the potential for enforcing biases of Black women being mad and violent, a stigma that actual crime statistics do not reflect.
Laura wants Kelly to herself and would not like Kelly to have a life with anyone except her so Laura does not care about the race of Kelly’s boyfriend, who is a Black man. So there is the added layer of significance that the only Black presenting woman in the film is a psychotic murderer, especially of a nice young white woman who happens to be in an interracial relationship. It implicitly perpetuates the stereotype that Black women have an issue with interracial relationships.
Did ordinary viewers watching “What Happened At 625 River Road?” consciously notice any of these tropes and just enjoy the plot twists and the brilliant visuals? No. Stephen King wrote in Lisey’s Story that we all drink from the same stream, and it is not unusual for the influence of that stream to emerge in films. We, including myself, consume and enjoy images, but those images include implicit bias, and it is important to become conscious of it so we do not blur the line between entertainment and real life, especially this year.