Thanksgiving (2023) - Movie Review

For as much shit as I’ve given Eli Roth over the years, I freely admit that I was actually looking forward to him releasing this film. The fake Grindhouse trailer that inspired this remains, for me at least, his greatest cinematic artwork. It’s a prime example of his bloodsplattered sense of humour, but without the annoying and/or smug underpinnings that keep getting in the way of the fun in his feature productions. I have a deep love for all things connected to Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse project, including the fake trailers and the films that eventually spawned from most of them. I may understand Edgar Wright’s stance on making his Don’t trailer into a full film, but a man can still dream.

And now that it’s finally here, I’m already relieved that it immediately quells the one real worry I had going into it: That it couldn’t measure up to how audacious the trailer was. It basically served as a Greatest Hits compilation for a film that was never made, similar to Don’t, with all manner of ridiculously gory and just plain ridiculous imagery. It alone almost pushed the whole Grindhouse presentation into the dreaded NC-17 rating.

But no, he’s not holding anything back. The better moments from the trailer, like the trampoline and the ‘turkey’, are definitely toned down in the final product, but only a bit. Otherwise, this is pure carnage candy, with astoundingly OTT bloodspray, gore, and creativity in the ways in which they’re spilled. Even if it couldn’t go the full monty and show how the turkey gets stuffed, it still shows that, for as much flak as I give the guy, Eli Roth knows how to work with the red stuff.

However, his willingness to push what he can show goes beyond just what carried over from the original trailer; the story starts out on a pretty out-there note too, as the first major set piece is a violent riot during a Black Friday sale. This is the kind of real-world inspiration that regularly gets thrown around as something that would make for a great horror movie, like a Dawn Of The Dead-esque zombie flick, but actually doing it could easily run into the realm of bad taste. Fictionalising actual tragedy for entertainment is a dicey prospect at the best of times, let alone when concerning something that is both frequently brought up in jest and has resulted in actual loss of human life in the real world.

With all this in mind, the biggest shock of this film is that Roth’s perspective on that very idea is… empathetic. He highlights that kind of gross consumerism, not to mention the dark spectacle that is the reason why people beyond the United States are even aware of such incidents (myself included), as something hideous. Something tragic. And quite frankly, something that people are more than within their rights to be furious about, given the industries that end up perpetuating those incidents, profit from them, and wash their hands of them. And not just the retail giants that allow for it either; crazed shoppers and opportunists are pulled into the crosshairs as well.

From there, we then get into the kind of social media narcissism that would witness such tragedy, and think that it would make for good video content. Pointing the fingers at self-obsessed teenagers and young adults is very old hat for Roth at this point, but screenwriter Jeff Rendell (who also worked on the original trailer) applies some much-needed focus to how it’s presented, showing a generation raised on the importance of aesthetics over content, and what that attitude can lead to. As sceptical as I was about Addison Rae being cast in this (as most people should be about anyone being cast in a film on the basis of "they’re popular on Tiktok"), it’s honestly a little bit ingenious that she’s here.

Where that dissection of aesthetics as a means of covering up the ugliness in people and the terrible things they can do to each other gets interesting is in how it plays into the main setting of the story: Plymouth, Massachusetts, who treat Thanksgiving like how modern-day Salem does Halloween. I got into this when looking at Killers Of The Flower Moon, but suffice to say, the United States as a nation can be… squeamish about acknowledging their early encounters with the people who were there first. And here, the intersection of social media and consumer cultures bleeds out into the overall depiction of Thanksgiving, and ends up highlighting that… yep, it’s the exact same thing here. It’s a time of year that exists, on a cultural level, to sanitise the traumatic conflict between the pilgrims and the Native Americans. It’s dressed up as the remembrance of a friendly meal between different cultures, of togetherness, but in actuality, it’s just a cheap mask covering up murder.

Now, all of this certainly earns my respect in how well each issue is examined and tied together to form a much larger picture, but my gratitude truly kicks in with how Roth doesn’t let his more flamboyant tendencies get in his own way this time. Rendell’s script really does the heavy lifting as, while the main characters still fit into a certain I Know What You Did Last Summer slasher niche, they’re not nearly as over-the-top as Roth usually writes these same archetypes. Even Rick Hoffman as Thomas Wright, the guy who owns the store where the riot took place, isn’t presented entirely as a mwah-hah-hah-ing bad guy. He’s still a dick, and quite a lot of the others are too, but not to the extent that he just becomes a cartoon. And by grounding the characters in something resembling actual human behaviour (as opposed to, say, having a guy jerk off while in a cage with a dead body and several alive ones just to show how much he doesn’t care about other people), it makes the chewier details that much easier to stomach.

Admittedly, drawing this much attention to the notion that people shouldn’t be so flippant about turning death into entertainment leads into its own problem: How do you reconcile that with being packaged in a film that, put simply, exists to entertain through presenting bloody murder? This isn’t the first time that an ultraviolent movie also served as a criticism of ultraviolence in media, although to Roth’s credit, he handles it better than Oliver Stone did with Natural Born Killers, or indeed his own earlier works.

John Carver, or rather the slasher killer wearing a John Carver mask, may carry himself with a playful swagger and show alarming ingenuity in how he carves up bodies, but there’s a certain understanding of why he’s doing it. He’s the shadow of all that aestheticisation, all that covering-up, all that handwaving of what actually happened. As delightfully scenery-chewing as he gets once we start hearing and seeing him properly, there’s this morbidly fascinating anti-hero edge to him. He’s on a revenge trip against a town that prefers fake pleasantness over real discomfort, popularity over compassion, and waffle irons over human life. I’m not saying he should have killed them… but I understand.

So… yeah. This movie (Plymouth) rocks! Eli Roth, the guy who I’ve associated with sophomoric satire for the longest time, delivered some genuinely thoughtful material, doing justice to topics that are either hot button issues that others have flubbed on or that don’t really get the serious attention that they should. It’s still emphatically his film, with all the extreme violence and dark comedy that he’s known for, but they work in service to what he’s really driving at, rather than standing in its way. It shows some major refinement that not only has me curious to see what he cooks up next (he’s apparently already working on a sequel to this, not to mention the Borderlands movie coming up soon), but I might even give his older films another look, now that I’ve got some real cinematic confirmation that he has his head on straight.