Anyway Resolution (2012) by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead is quite possibly my favourite film of all time because
It's a meta-horror movie in which the twist is "the characters work out they're in a horror movie" and normally these tend to either go parody "okay well we just need to avoid doing the things dumb horror movie characters do right 🙄" or they go way-too-serious "fuck you audience how dare you want to watch a horror movie I can't believe you'd want to put people in these situations you perverts" but Resolution does Neither of these things
The characters start out by going "okay I guess we're in a horror movie. That sucks. I guess I'd better just disengage with the situation and evacuate while I still can-" and then the movie hard blocks that because
the monster in the movie is the fucking Director, y'all
It's trying to get an interesting and watchable story out of the two of them, and it has been trying for god-only-knows how long (in Resolution you're left with the sense that it's a time loop, so maybe this is all happening in folded time or whatever and they'll get to move on with their lives when it's done with them, but The Endless says 'No, it's doing this in Real Time, and their families have not idea what happened to them', which: my favourite flavour of horror, "bad news you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and now the universe has decided that your life is over in ways that you would never have believed possible yesterday"), but it knows that All Of The Endings It Has So Far Are Unsatisfying, and until it can get that perfect performance out of them it's going to keep doing reshoots over and over until it's satisfied. 'Michael abandons Chris and goes home' is a bad ending. 'They both get shot' is a bad ending. 'Chris kills himself' is a bad ending.
The audience aren't blamed for watching this because they had no part in it's existence; the film exists whether or not an audience is there to watch. The only person that a film depends on to get made is the director; it is by their whim that the characters are placed in this situation, and no-one else's. Resolution (2012) is the only film to get Rage Against The Author Right, and that is why it's maybe the best film of all time.












