The Resort (2021)

The Resort takes a horror setup you’ve seen before—friends chasing an urban legend—and drops it into a Hawaiian paradise so lush and sunlit that the dread feels almost indecent, like a shadow creeping across a postcard. Director Taylor Chien makes terrific use of the abandoned resort’s corridors, elevators, and open-air ruins, letting the location do half the scaring while the other half comes from a steady tightening of panic as the night turns disorienting and cruel. The film’s best trick is its atmosphere: it doesn’t just want to startle you, it wants to make you feel stranded, watched, and a little foolish for thinking curiosity is ever free. If you like your horror glossy, fast-moving, and driven by a haunting vibe more than deep character study, this is the kind of eerie vacation you’ll be glad you took—at a safe distance.

The Resort wants to be a breezy “friends-on-vacation” ghost hunt that turns into a spooky, cursed-location nightmare, and the Hawaiian setting does give it a postcard sheen. The problem is it leans hard on familiar horror beats—missing batteries, jumpy stalking, possession antics—without building much tension or delivering a payoff that feels earned, and the acting and dialogue often don’t sell the fear. If you’re allergic to cliché-ridden plotting and characters making obvious choices just to keep the movie moving, this will test your patience. Still, if you mainly want a simple, low-stakes haunted-resort yarn with a couple of decent makeup moments and don’t mind the rough execution, you might get a serviceable late-night watch out of it.