Horizon Line - A Standard Survival Thriller Movie Which Took too long to Get to the Suspenseful Part

I was actually aware that this movie was released on HBO Go some time ago but did not got the chance to watch it then, and I forgotten all about it. That is until it was suddenly released in one cinema chain in Indonesia 2 days ago that made me gain interest. So, I decided to watch it last night. OK, here we go.

Brief Story Line

Sara (Allison Williams - Get Out etc) was planning to attend the wedding of her best friend Pascale (Pearl Mackie) in Mauritius. Due to some reasons, she had no choice but to ride in a small airplane from a small island piloted by Freddy (Keith David - Nope etc) to the location. Unexpectedly Sara's old boyfriend Jackson (Alexander Dreymon - The Last Kingdom TV series etc) also board the plane.

During the flight, Freddy somehow got a heart attack. And now Sara and Jackson had to work together to save themselves.

So how would the story conclude? You can find out in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Yes, the plot of this movie was very simple. It was a matter of life and death situation on an airplane where we are expected to feel the suspense throughout the movie. Unfortunately though, the film that only had 1 hour 27 minutes duration gave us intro for around 27 minutes, which gave us less than an hour for the interesting part. No offense on the characters backstory but I thought having one third of it to provide context was a bit too long, not to mention they were not that interesting either.

Good thing though that at least the suspense was kept quite constantly with few dramatic scenes. And to my surprise, some of the intense scenes that were definitely done through special effects were pretty convincing, although few of them were a bit too obvious. But it is understandable considering this is not a heavy budgeted movie that would gave the movie makers fund to assign major experienced companies to do them.

Now I am not sure what it would be like seeing this in the theater since I watched it on my TV. Perhaps with decent sound system and larger screen, it would give a better dramatic effect. However, even with those limitations, I did enjoy some of the moments. I wish the ending was done a bit differently though as it would probably give a more memorable impact, as compared to the one they had. 

Btw this movie was apparently a Swedish production which was directed by Mikael Marcimain whose prior experience was directing some Swedish TV series like Wallander and movies such as Call Girl. It was actually a 2020 production and was released in 2020 and 2021 in Sweden and US respectively. I also noticed two films were mentioned on the poster of this movie and after doing some digging, the writers Josh Campbell & Matthew Stuecken also wrote 10 Cloverfield Lane. However I could not find any reference to The Shallow (or maybe I did not dig enough). 

Overall to me this movie was just so so. It was sometimes suspenseful enough, but not enough to make this a great survival movie. The not so convincing facial expressions of the lead cast probably contribute to the lack of terrifying effect as well (at least to me). Nevertheless, considering this is not a major blockbuster movie, I thought it was still tolerable. So if you are looking for a really well crafted movie of this genre, I doubt you would be satisfied with this. But if you manage your expectation and just want to have a bit of suspense, then this probably would be to your liking. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars