Film

Ultimately, a doozy of a leap has to be made with The Ruins—both Scott Smith’s best-selling horror novel and this mostly faithful, far-from-trashy adaptation. What are we leaping to? Flesh-eating, sentient, murderous…vines. Yup: evil plants. They swirl atop an ancient Mexican ziggurat, upon which four curious American vacationers and a disabled German find themselves forcibly quarantined by the locals. Why indulge this? That’s harder to answer, but as with Smith’s other mystery, A Simple Plan, the rigors of the pacing and plot mechanics—even as exercised by half-smart protagonists—are pleasures in and of themselves.

Director Carter Smith seems to get this; he does an unambiguous job of supplying the book’s implicit tramp-stamped hedonism (especially well conveyed by Jena Malone), and throughout the film, you’re never suckered in by a false sense of heroics. These are Survivor-deep characters, distracted by pettiness, and caught in a peril far beyond their grasp. Decisions go from bad to head-slappingly worse. The effects are properly grody, especially as the vines go subcutaneous, and The Ruins has a capper of a self-torture scene that feels like the omega of that trend. It must be said that Smith’s original downer ending has been blown by some last-minute studio timidity. But even made more conventional, the movie grows on you.