You know, I’m not entirely sure how this managed to get onto my list for this year’s Horrortoberfest but here we are. I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen more Covid horror movies out there. I’m sure there are plenty of them inspired by it but odd there aren’t more directly about it.

It’s April, 2020 and college students Mira and Parker are leaving campus in order to quarantine. They have decided to spend their lockdown at Parker’s family cabin at a lake to wait out the pandemic. Just beautiful woods and nobody around for miles. The perfect place to ensure you don’t come into contact with anyone else. Except when DJ, Parker’s situationship shows up at the cabin unannounced because he’s jealous that Parker was seen kissing some boy in a social media post. Oh, I guess also there is somebody with a knife that’s trying to kill them.

In the movie’s favor, I do like the way that they present the slasher as a very normal, very human person. At least most of the time. When they get into a fight or try to stab someone, nobody has supernatural strength or the ability to just teleport around. There are a few points where they end up making him absolutely ninja quiet in the cabin they are in which, if you’ve ever been in one of those cabins, you know you aren’t going to be able to go up those wooden stairs without making a bunch of creaks. I do also appreciate the resourcefulness and tenacity of our leads. Mira and Parker aren’t your standard disposable slasher fodder but they are also not perfect by any means.

Unfortunately, the movie suffers from having the goofiest slasher premise that it wants to take seriously. Since there are really only a handful of characters, you also aren’t going to be getting a particularly high body count but if you’re favorite part of a slasher film is the chase sequence, you are in luck. So much of this movies run time is given over to an extended chase sequence that at turns feels very tense and others times it’s of ridiculous. The killer’s actions fluctuate between being these believable intelligent scenes and then sometimes you are left scratching your head like “Why would you possibly do that?”. While not a bad movie, Sick does often feel like it is constantly just falling short of being as good as it could have been.

I think in like 10 years or so, this will be one of those movies that people that went through the pandemic might look back on and be, if not nostalgic, at least like “Oh shit, yeah” about. For now, it’s still a little close to the actual time for the Fauci jokes to feel anything but kind of eye-rolling.

Score: 3 out of 5