Instead, they favor the not-quite-perp going on the lam. Ergo “Safer at Home” immediately loses credibility when the panicked participants, most of whom have known each other half their 30-ish lives, fail to call police (or an ambulance). However, we viewers know it was an accident, as does the surviving squabbler. Indeed, one couple starts having a screaming fight that results in grievous harm - accidentally so, but since not everyone (or anyone, actually) was paying close attention to their screen at the time, the specter of criminal guilt arises. But the fear that these drugs are not exactly as advertised soon arises as the others instead experience paranoia, anxiety and anger. The warm and fuzzies fast overwhelm him and Mia, to a degree somewhat inappropriate for semi-public consumption. It’s Ollie who has shipped everyone packages of party favors including some Ecstasy, which (after overcoming resistance from skittish Ben) everyone doses on. (like Evan), Oliver (Michael Kupisk) and his new squeeze Mia (Emma Lahana), who’s recently escaped an abusive relationship. The others are New York gay couple Ben (Adwin Brown) and Liam (Daniel Robaire) and in L.A. His own longterm live-in girlfriend Jen (Jocelyn Hudon) has a pregnancy-test-related surprise she’s saving to tell him about later, though she can’t resist first informing Austinite Harper (Alisa Allapach), the only single here. Johnson) birthday, so his pals and their partners are celebrating as best they can.

An opening montage projects a worst-case-scenario spiraling from Trump’s initial pandemic negligence to multiple new COVID strains, curfews and societal chaos, with more than 30 million Americans dead from the virus by mid-2022. Here the annoying BFFs are duly stuck at home - or rather, in homes scattered across the country. The director’s last two features (2017’s “Escape Room” - the first of a half dozen features to date with that title - then last year’s “No Escape”) were both about annoying millennial characters trapped in recreational “games” that turned out to be deadly serious in a vaguely “Saw”-like way.

Vertical Entertainment is releasing to available U.S./Canadian theaters, VOD and digital on Feb. But not every story is suited for Zoom-style presentation, and this derivative, uninspired one only underlines the strain in being fit to a presentational framework that does neither actors nor audience any favors. You have to admire filmmakers finding ways to keep plugging away within pandemic restrictions. Will Wernick’s film not only fails to use that format in clever or suspenseful ways, it blows the basics of maintaining plausibility and viewer interest. Unfortunately, we’re likely to get a lot more in the mode of “ Safer at Home,” which likewise hinges on friends video-conferencing during shutdown. It was, however, bound to be the exception which proved a preexisting rule: that found-footage thrillers remain a tapped-out genre, no matter if one in every 20 or so manages to squeeze some new life from the form. One of the sleeper hits of the shutdown last year was Rob Savage’s British horror “Host,” a very short (just under an hour) and sweetly scary tale of friends whose weekly Zoom call during COVID quarantine gets crashed by an unwelcome supernatural visitor.

Stuck at home reviews