This is the story of John and Kenny Stiles (Jason Mac and Elliott Armstrong), a pair of brothers who are making plans for a trip to North Carolina and who are filming themselves every step of the way, going so far as to mount cameras to the front of their car so they can even record themselves driving. We gather that the brothers are planning something big, but aren’t immediately made privy to what those plans specifically entail. Stopping in front of a City Hall building, they follow a man in a business suit back to his house, where they break in and hold him hostage at gunpoint. After some righteous sermonizing from John about how actions affect others and how the man, a judge, gets off on playing God, the brothers cut the man’s throat and create a scene out of his body, dressing him up in religious attire to hammer the God accusation home. Next they turn their focus to a couple, whom the brothers chastise for their prevalent charity work before also stabbing them to death and mutilating their bodies.
It isn’t until their third attack, a social worker whom they kidnap, that their motives finally become clear. The brothers were abused by their parents as children. They were briefly removed from their home and placed into foster care, but the decision was overturned and they were reunited with their parents, in a now even more hostile environment. The judge was the one who made the ruling to send the boys home. The social worker was the one who took them back. The couple was a pair of neighbors who neglected to intervene on a night when the brothers fled their parents and pounded on their door for help. The brothers are on an elaborate vengeance spree against every conceivable party involved in keeping them under their parents’ roof. The way ‘Infliction’ doles out this information is fairly admirable. It unveils nuggets of information with each murder, but keeps the brothers’ motives mysterious for a decent amount of time. It shows a surprising amount of restraint as it gradually peels back its layers.
Eventually, the brothers work their way up the ladder to the real culprits behind their lifelong torment as they set their sights on their actual family. First they stop at their sister’s house to also pay her back for not intervening on their behalf. And, in the most interesting bit in the entire film, it turns out that the sister, Andrea (Ana Shaw), is ready for them, and has some predatory acumen of her own as she outmaneuvers them and makes them her hostages instead. She decides to take them to their parents’ house, where a final showdown is had, and all these bitter warring factions finally let each other have it.
‘Infliction’ wants to say something about the horrors of child abuse and the demons that victims carry on their backs their entire lives, but the movie is too clumsy and ham-handed to thread the needle. This premise could have made for a mad-slasher film, but the form in which it’s presented here is at war with the horror-genre setting it wants to inhabit. This is a psychodrama that throws in bloody knifings and found-footage recordings to masquerade as something it’s not and it’s jarring. The film can’t seem to settle on whether the brothers are sympathetic or monstrous, and it alternates between the two, where each brother gets a turn at being regretful of what they’re doing or taking perverse pleasure from it, marking the characters with a frustrating inconsistency. It doesn’t help that the acting is so spotty. Jason Mac doesn’t hit all the right notes, but he does a commendable job at conveying a sense of coiled rage. That’s much better than Armstrong, who feels like a stand-in for another actor that never showed up to the set. The victims are a mixed bag as well. The actress playing the social worker provides a fine sense of fear and contrition, while the guy playing the judge just stinks up the joint.
‘Infliction’ also has major pacing problems. So many scenes drag on endlessly, beating us over the head with the same notions over and over. The biggest offender in this regard is the climax of the film, at the parents’ house. Having the parents, the brothers and the sister all divided and actively plotting against everyone else is a solid idea, turning a conventional family unit into a nest of vipers. But the film doesn’t know what it wants to do here so it just has everyone yell at each other for what feels like an eternity without really getting at anything meaningful. Even when the inevitable bloodshed commences, it has no impact and doesn’t feel like it’s in the service of a greater point. And the movie is hilarious in how it over-demonizes the parents. It’s not enough that they abused their sons, but we also learn that they molested them, buried the daughter’s firstborn baby alive, and if you need anything more than that, Dad has a giant confederate flag hanging on his bedroom wall. The film might as well have gone one step further and revealed that these two also masterminded 9/11.
As I said, one could have made a straightforward horror film out of this premise and one could have made a hard-hitting drama about child abuse as well, but trying to mash the two conceits together essentially negates them both. ‘Infliction’, in its drive to say something, winds up saying nothing at all.
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