‘The Aviary’ VOD Review
Stars: Malin Akerman, Lorenza Izzo, Sandrine Holt, Chris Messina | Written and Directed by Chris Cullari, Jennifer Raite
Two women, Jillian and Blair, flee into the New Mexican desert to escape the clutches of an insidious cult. Consumed by fear and paranoia, they can’t shake the feeling that they are being followed by its leader, a man as seductive as he is controlling. With their supplies dwindling and their senses starting to fail them, they are faced with a horrifying question: how do you run from an enemy who lives inside your head?
With Malin Akerman’s Jillian saying the cult leader they’re running from wanted to carve his cults “logo” into her flesh and the other woman, Blair (Lorenza Izzo) seemingly unaware of herself doing a cult until it was too late, The Aviary screams out that its plot is a riff on the scandal surrounding Alison Mack and the NXIVM cult she was a part of. Ackerman’s Jillian even recruited Blair in much the same way Mack allegedly did.
Wandering through the desert, you’d think Jillian and Blair would be running on empty – afraid of the cult past catching up with them and running out of supplies – but instead, the duo are played like a couple of friends out for a fun hike. There’s no danger, no suspense to their travels… What danger there is comes at night as both Jillian and Blair have strange dreams, visions almost, of their former cult leader Seth. These surreal, hypnotic scenes are the most effective aspect of The Aviary but unfortunately, there’s nothing much to the film beyond them.
The film soon descends into the pair being lost in the desert in the opposite direction they needed to travel – perhaps brainwashed by Seth or maybe just too naive to find their own way in the desert? The Aviary clearly plays out that it’s the former, with both women LITERALLY still under the control of the cult leader they’re running from – so much so that they seemingly sabotage their own escape in various ways.
That becomes the driving force of the film once the duo realise they’ve been walking in circles. The uncertainty. Are they lost? Are they manipulating each other? Are they being manipulated still by Seth? Have Seth’s “barrier” sessions truly worked on Jillian and Blair, twisting their perception? We get more questions than answers unfortunately. All of which work against The Aviary‘s story. After all, if Jillian and Blair can’t believe what they see, hear or do, can we? And if we can’t, how are we supposed to empathise with the women and care about what happens to either of them.
** 2/5
The Aviary is out now on digital platforms from Altitude.
