Hot on the heels of horror movies like Truth or Dare and Ouija; we have another horror film based on trying to make a kids game into something spooky. This time it is less about the actual game and more about…well, actually, I’m not entirely sure what the hell this is about. It’s a confused jumble of a movie that makes you think it might be about alternate realities but it’s really about our dark thoughts given life or something? It felt like the movie didn’t really care all that much about trying to be anything,

The movie follows a high school kid named Jude that goes to a house party. At some point he ends up playing “seven in heaven” with a girl, June, that is ostensibly dating his biggest tormentor, Derrick. When they get out of the closet, though, they are no longer in the same place that they were. Everything is the same but different. Jude gets accused of killing Derrick. June’s sister tries to kill her. Their school guidance counselor is somehow in charge of things but wants them to get home and knows that they aren’t in the right reality. Meanwhile, we know this isn’t happening just in their heads as we constantly shift back to the party and nobody can find them.

For a movie that bills itself as a horror film, there is very little going on that makes it that way. It doesn’t have any sense of dread or tension and even if it did, the constant shift back to the house party trying to fend off the cops and generally just having mundane issues would severely undercut anything they were trying to do. There also aren’t really any jump scares to speak of either. You get one moment when we see June’s sister smothering her with a pillow but that’s pretty much it. I think it falls flat mostly because we don’t know enough about these characters to make an alternate reality really feel jarring. Also once it turns into “This isn’t an alternate reality but is actually the place where bad thoughts go” just makes the whole thing confused.

The rules of this portal to another reality are also arbitrary and never really explained. Jude and June go through but it’s because Jude found a sexy playing card of his mom. Maybe. When he tries to go back and sits in the closet for 7 minutes, it doesn’t work but the message he wrote in the other place appears in the regular universe’s closet. When he tries again, he has June with him and they think maybe that’s what was missing is they had to both be there. Nope! Turns out trying to do that makes the other dimension meaner? Like now the undead Derrick forces them into a game where if they lie, someone dies but nobody actually does in the real world? And in order to get back they have to burn the house down while they are in the closet but it still has to be seven minutes even though nothing has been made of why Seven in Heaven would trigger the reality shift. The end also sees Derrick disappear after going in the closet but he didn’t have a playing card and wasn’t playing the game and why the hell would this random closet even have supernatural powers in the first place?

Score: 2 out of 5. The movie is just frustrating to watch. With no actual horror and a plot that makes less sense the more you think about it; Seven in Heaven is just a mess of a film. The actors try their damnedest, I’ll give them that.