Pins and Needles

by Mike McGranaghan

Pins and Needles is aptly titled because that’s what this nifty thriller keeps you on for 81 taut minutes. The premise is ingeniously simple – a basic cat-and-mouse tale where the main character’s health issue adds an extra degree of peril. Writer/director James Villeneuve makes a solid feature debut, showing real skill at creating and sustaining suspense.

Max (Chelsea Clark) is a diabetic graduate student specializing in biology. She’s returning from a project deep in the middle of nowhere. On the way back, the car she and her traveling companions are in gets two flat tires. Max walks to the large residence suspiciously located right next to the dirt road. While looking for someone to help, she sees the home’s owners, Frank (Ryan McDonald) and Emily (Kate Corbett), brutally murder her friends. She’s suddenly in the position of having to figure out how to escape this remote location before they find her – all while tending to her diabetic needs, which get flared up from the heat and stress.

It's a common horror movie trope to have an asthmatic or diabetic character require their health care gear in the middle of a terror sequence. Pins and Needles effectively moves the idea to the forefront. We know Max will never be able to escape Frank and Emily if her blood sugar gets too far out of whack. Several of the most exciting scenes find her attempting to regulate herself while simultaneously hiding from the couple. In one of them, she has to give herself an insulin shot while they’re mere feet away. That one-two punch infuses the movie with a nonstop anxious quality.

The other thing that distinguishes it is the fact that Frank and Emily are not your garden variety psychopaths. I wouldn’t dream of giving anything away, but as the story progresses, you learn more about who they are and what they’re doing. They have their own twisted justification for the murders. Their interactions are darkly funny because they can be a typical bickering couple at the same time that they’re carrying out unconscionable behaviors. A minor downside is that the spouses frequently speak in semi-awkward exposition in order for the viewer to know what’s going on. McDonald and Corbett make it work, nonetheless.

Pins and Needles really belongs to Chelsea Clark. From the start, she earns our rooting interest. The actress conveys a lot with her eyes, and that allows her to avoid the sort of screamy, histrionic performance that can sometimes ruin a thriller. Even better, she projects intelligence. The tactics Max uses to evade her tormentors are smart, and Clark expertly shows us the wheels turning inside her head.

A compelling heroine, loathsome villains, and non-stop tension add up to make this one of the year’s most satisfying discoveries.

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