Director – Patrick Brice, Screenplay – Patrick Brice & Mark Duplass, Producers – Jason Blum & Carolyn Craddock, Music – Julian Wass, Visual Effects – Local Hero, Special Effects – Elle Favorule. Production Company – Blumhouse.
Mark Duplass (Aaron), Desiree Akhavan (Sara), Karan Soni (Dave)
Sara runs a video channel Encounters where she shoots videos in which she goes to meet and profile people who place personals ads online. She answers an ad for someone wanting to hire a videographer and travels out of the city to meet Aaron. He explains to her that he is a serial killer. Having just turned forty, he wants her to document the experience as he tries to find greater meaning in his life. She decides to accept the job and they set about making a documentary.
Creep (2014) was a creepy little film made by Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice, who both played the characters on screen while both also co-directed the film. Duplass played the role of an over-friendly character (called Josef in that film) who hires Brice’s filmmaker to make a documentary about him but proves over-friendly to the point of eventually being psychopathic. The film was improvised between Duplass and Brice, before being given a release by Blumhouse. Creep 2 is a sequel .Creep 3 (2022) was a third film, featuring Duplass but from a different director.
Creep 2 has a great start where we meet Karan Soni and his new best friend comes to visit and we discover that is Mark Duplass. As they sit at the dining room table, Duplass admits that he has been the one involved in the ongoing harassment of Soni, while talking about his mid-life crisis and then abruptly slitting Soni’s throat. It sets the scene for the film perfectly. The film then jumps to Desiree Akhavan and her series of interviews with eccentrics she met online, before she receives an invitation to come and make a video for Duplass.
This is one sequel that figures that audiences have already seen the first film and doesn’t bother having to repeat the basics of the set-up all over again for us. The first film had Patrick Brice as an innocent who was drawn into Mark Duplass’s web. The original has a charged sense of out there weirdness where you genuinely didn’t know which way it was going to veer from one moment to the next. By contrast, the sequel gives us Desiree Akhavan, who is much less of a guileless innocent and to whom Duplass freely admits upfront that he is a serial killer – indeed, she becomes quite excited about making the video even while admitting that doing so is triggering all of her red flags.
This does mean that Creep 2 comes with less of that out there unexpectedness that the original did. There are assorted scenes where Desiree Akhavan and Mark Duplass make their film but these seem to lack the uneasy tension of not quite knowing what is going to happen any minute. There is also not as much the same sense of Duplass playing games and messing with her. This film’s mistake is giving us a protagonist who seems much more clued into what is going on – it is like a slasher movie victim who is aware of the clichés of the genre as they enact them.
Trailer here