How to Deter a Robber (2020)

Your experience with "How to Deter a Robber" is going to depend on your expectations for the film and what you want out of it. This is a low-budget suspense/comedy that understands its budget limitations and works around them. Despite some over-the-top characters, the movie is more grounded in reality than things of this type usually are. If you go into this wanting a surreal nightmare brought to life, you're going to be disappointed. The movie doesn't deliver buckets of blood or a high body count, the villains aren't evil (or at least one of them isn't), and the protagonists aren't action heroes. To the movie's credit, this is criticizing power fantasies (Home Alone, in particular), not trying to replicate them.

All of that is clever and entertaining, but it does come with a bit of a caveat. While the movie is amusing and fun, it's not amazing or emotionally moving. It's a solid hour and a half that offers an experience more in line with watching a few episodes of a really good TV show than a powerful movie.

I want to be clear that I don't consider that a problem. This is a solid flick with a novel take on its material. It wants to be fun and tell a straightforward coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a horror cliche that refuses to adhere to the rules of that cliche. It doesn't have to be anything more than that, and the fact it doesn't pretend otherwise is why it works.

The point of all that being, this is a decent movie that you may or may not want to see. I realize that isn't a ringing endorsement, but it is a tepid one. This thing is pretty good. It's not likely to be your (or anyone's) favorite movie of all time, but it's just good enough to justify a spoiler warning. If you're interested in an R-rated spin on Home Alone that's light on gore and more funny than disturbing (so the opposite approach as that of the fantastic Better Watch Out), you might want to stop reading now. "How to Deter a Robber" is better with its surprises surprising.

You've been warned.

The movie's protagonist is eighteen year-old Madison (Vanessa Marano), who's trying to endure Christmas at her family's cabin. Her sweet but not particularly intelligent boyfriend, Jimmy (Benjamin Papac), is with them, as well. The two of them break into a neighbor's cottage after Christmas dinner is ruined, get drunk, and sleep through a robbery. Because they're on the premises, they're suspected of being behind the break-in, particularly since they did, in fact, break in. They wind up having to stay in town with Madison's uncle, Andy (Chris Mulkey), while the rest of the family leave for the rest of their vacation.

It quickly becomes clear this was just one of several break-ins (Andy discovers his house was robbed, as well, so they return to the cabin), so Madison and Jimmy decide to set up traps and alarms around the cabin. That night, the robbers mistakenly believe their cabin is unoccupied and break in. If you're expecting an extended cat-and-mouse sequence, you've seen too many movies. Before long, the masked robbers pull a gun and tie everyone up. Jimmy keeps expecting Andy to do something, but Andy just tells the teenagers to cooperate - after all, the robbers are armed.

Let's talk a little about Patrick (Sonny Valicenti) and Christine (Abbie Cobb), the two robbers. Christine, like Jimmy, isn't all that smart, but she's not otherwise not that bad of a person. She doesn't want to hurt anyone and even goes out of her way to make the hostages comfortable. Patrick, on the other hand, is a bit of a jerk. He's emotionally abusive towards Christine and is on edge from the start. However, he has no interest in killing anyone... at least at first.

Remember those traps I mentioned earlier? Christine springs one and winds up with a broken nose, which prompts her to remove her mask. Now the hostages have seen her. Patrick begins freaking out, and Andy realizes they're in far more danger than they were earlier. While Patrick and Christine are talking in another room, Andy frees them using a pocket knife. He then sneaks the kids into a hidden basement but stays behind to conceal the entrance. Afterward, he's injured and knocked unconscious. Meanwhile, the teens are hidden but trapped. Patrick and Christine search the house for the kids, but fail to locate the basement. When they hear Patrick tell Christine to shoot the kids while he disposes of Andy, Madison realizes she needs to act.

Once she knows Patrick is gone, she calls out to Christine, leading her to the basement. She manages to connect with Christine and convinces her to help them, rather than shoot them. She even convinces Christine to give her the gun. The teens head onto the frozen lake, where Patrick is planning to dump Andy into a hole in the ice. Madison tries to get Patrick to surrender as they hear Christine drive away. Patrick bets that Madison won't pull the trigger, which ends up being a mistake.

In an afterward, we learn things worked out all right. The police showed up, and the teens managed to evade trouble since they acted in self-defense. Christine is arrested and presumably charged: we never learn how that goes. We do learn that Madison breaks up with Patrick, which is a welcome deviation from how these usually end. And then, at the very end, we discover this is all a college admissions essay she's writing (which makes some cheesy stuff around reconciliation with her family easier to swallow).

The movie is consistently amusing, thanks to its ridiculous characters. Horror (and horror adjacent) movies have been moving towards smarter protagonists for decades in response to criticism of common tropes employed through the '80s and '90s. This pulls a 180 and builds a story around teenagers who behave in entirely different stupid ways. Even the relatively intelligent Madison is arrogant and impulsive, which is why she's in this predicament in the first place. Meanwhile Jimmy just behaves erratically, constantly citing and following rules he's picked up from movies and TV that don't apply and make matters worse.

It's all incredibly refreshing, as are a slew of minor details that ground the situation and sidestep the usual melodrama. Things like having Christine live and be captured, having Madison break up with Jimmy because she's outgrown him, and subverting the closing narrative (while still using it to resolve Madison's arc) are surprising because they're not the way these usually play out. Hell, the whole relationship between Madison and Jimmy is a breath of fresh air because it allows for that resolution after fleshing out his character and implying she's been emotionally unfair to him. The refusal to oversimplify makes for a nice change of pace.

From a holiday perspective, the movie first and foremost seems to be tipping its cap to Home Alone while also serving as a satire of its power-fantasy simplicity. This is a movie about growing up, and accepting that childish antics have consequences (something the Home Alone movies tend to gloss over) is a big part of that.

On a more primal level, the end of one year and beginning of the next tie into the coming-of-age story at the core of this. The movie doesn't really call attention to this, but it's certainly in the subtext. As always, you could also view the "surviving the night" motif as an extension of the winter solstice and centuries of ghost stories and the like - the home invasion certainly feels like a modern version of an old tale. Whether that's intentional or not is anyone's guess: this could simply be mirroring Home Alone, which in turn was (allegedly) copying 3615 code Père Noël, which was almost certainly an intentional allusion to those sorts of scary stories. So at the very least it's in the film's DNA.

As I've already established, this is good but... well... only good, for lack of a better descriptor. This is the rare time I almost wish we rated movies so I could say "3.5 out of 5" or something to convey that it's not a movie you'll regret watching, but also not one you'll be rushing to rewatch the following year. For Maria Bissell's first feature length production, made with what I'm guessing was a modest budget and what Wikipedia states was a rushed filming schedule, I'd consider that a win.