A stalking film lives or dies at a distance. The threat needs to get closer, or at least feel like it might in the next breath, and the audience needs to feel that gap closing, whether anyone on screen does or not. Jacked understands this. This only closes the gap instead of closing it.
The setup is clean. In the summer of 1987, two small-town teenagers named Lindsay and Jay are having a fun day at a lake, their car breaks down on the way home, and a stranger begins to drive around them in the dark. It’s the whole machine. Director John Fucile, working from a script he wrote with Simon Fraser, deliberately keeps it small. One night, one dead car, one predator, seventy-five minutes. I respect the discipline of that and for a while I was on his side. Somewhere in the second half I started to notice how much further there was to go, and a survival thriller should never have you looking at the map.
The movie it wants to be
Fucile aims for something simple and analog. No phone to call for help, no neighbors within earshot, no easy exit, just two kids and a machine that won’t start. The 1987 setting is more than nostalgia. It removes all modern escape hatches and brings teenagers back to a world where a dead battery is a real emergency. It’s a solid foundation and the film was made with care. Jacked was shot in an unusually wide 2.55:1 frame, and the format earns its place in the quiet stretches, when the deserted road and tree line gather around a stranded car. When the film is just watching and listening, there is a real sense of place. The night seems great. Children feel small inside.
Stillness is not suspense
The problem is what happens between these images. A patient thriller earns its patience by changing something while you wait. The threat increases, space tightens, a little hope appears and disappears. Jacked mostly repeats. The stranger appears, the teens panic, the moment passes, and the situation returns almost exactly to where it started. Menace arrives, then politely steps aside so the film can set up the next near miss.
Because the danger keeps returning to neutral, it never really gets worse. The stalker starts to feel less like an intentional man and more like a switch that the plot reverses when a scene needs shaking up. He’s scariest at first, before repetition fades him. In subsequent encounters, I felt the pace coming, and predictability is poison for this kind of film. The broken down car should be a trap that gets tighter by the minute. Too often, it serves as a waiting room.
The characters can’t cover this, because the movie doesn’t give them enough to cover it up. Lindsay and Jay are sympathetic in small, specific ways, and Marla Jean Robison and Tom Koch pounce on fear without hiding. But we learn very little about who these two are before night falls, so the long waiting periods are nothing to delve into. Dread needs a place to regroup. Here, most of the time, it evaporates. Even at seventy-five minutes, the film feels padded, which is a strange thing to say about a film shorter than most, and it’s the clearest sign that a leaner cut, perhaps even a short film, lies within this one.
What the camera does right
Everything doesn’t stop. There’s a beat built around a sound on the roof of the car that works exactly as the whole movie wants it to, a little invasion of the space the teenagers believed was theirs. The cinematography stays engaged with actual darkness without collapsing into darkness, which is harder to achieve on an indie budget than polished films lead you to believe. Anthony Cipriani has a truly offbeat presence when the film lets him wander into the frame and wait. None of this is luck. Someone here has an eye and knows how to use a location.
What keeps leaking is the connective tissue. Suspense builds in the cutting and escalation, in the way one bad moment makes the next worse, and that’s where Jacked fails. Individual pieces are often good. The pressure between them does not hold.
Who is it for
If you like the most stripped-down survival films, the ones that trade scenery for waiting and treat a single location like the whole world, you may find Jacked closer to his wavelength than I did. There’s a real audience for a thriller this patient and this small, and I don’t think they’re wrong for wanting one. I wanted it too. I just needed to wait to carry more weight each time he came back.
Fear does not come from the passage of time. This is because time is running out. The most powerful stalker films make every minute cost something, reduce the available space, reduce the odds, and turn the wait into a countdown rather than a loop. Jacked has the eye, the setting and the sincerity of this film. He has yet to find the escalation that would make the danger seem inevitable rather than planned. There is a good short film, and a real filmmaker, somewhere in this beautiful and frustrating night. I’d rather see what Fucile builds next than pretend this one gets under my skin.
Jacked was released on demand by Indican Pictures on June 30, following a limited theatrical release in New Jersey and Toronto on June 26. In the United States, it is available for rental or purchase on Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango at Home, Google Play, YouTube and Plex, as well as Verizon and Dish, and it is available on DVD and Blu-ray. The film lasts 75 minutes and is not rated.
Access to reviews was provided by the film’s publicity team. This did not affect the opinion expressed.
5. Final scoring line
2/5
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