I'm confused on what Max's motivation or lack thereof was. Did it have something to do with the bar? Did he know Tom from somewhere? Or was he like The Joker and just wanted to cause trouble? I loved the suspense and the realism but the last few minutes really confused me.
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Max knew from the point that Tom made the reservation at the hotel that they were his next prey...The fact that the hotel -- which we see at the end to be totally run-down, not operational and surrounded by cars* of previous victims -- has a working website and someone to take reservations tells us that that was Max setting them up. I'm sure he was at the bar to scope them out, since he had told Tom to meet them outside of there to follow his truck out to where the hotel is, but they were already in his sights before they arrived there.
As for Max's motivations, yeah...It seems like it was to make sure that a horror movie happened to this couple. I wasn't satisfied either.
* I mean, there must have been 50 wrecked cars out there. That many people have gone missing and no one's ever put it together that there's something sinister about this place??
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Despite insistence from some to the contrary, I really don't think those cars belonged to Max's former victims. I think it was just an old junkyard. You do sometimes get those in weird places in the middle of the countryside. I grew up very near where this was actually filmed in Cornwall, and I know of several in the area. It's perfectly possible they were his first victims. He says how long it took him to set up the website, as if maybe this is his first experiment.
shareIt was a study in fear. He wanted to see if he could torment someone to the point of them trying to kill him. They explain in the dvd commentary that Max likes standing in front of cars and is fascinated by the idea of finding someone who wont swerve to miss him so puts them through hell before finally standing in the middle of the road. Its all (for Max) building to that moment to see if she will do it.
One point they make in the making of extras and when the film played at London Frightfest last August is that Max is not the one to turn violent first. Its Tom who ultimately attacks him first. I don't quite know if I agree with that as Max grabs Lucy twice in a threatening manner so I think he was violent with them first.
I have seen this at a movie fest beginning of this year.
Despite the fact that I started to dislike the female lead after a while, to me she was utterly annoying, I liked what happened to the "couple".
That whole setting of somehow being together, but mostly just dating for 2 weeks was interesting.
When Max joined them, it really got weird. I could sense something bigger was going on.
The fact that his motivation is not thoroughly explained makes him more interesting (for me). He could've been a psychology student, doing his own observations while on the other hand accepting the fate that would come with this sort of "research" (i.e. getting killed).
[I somehow put him in the same corner with Tommy from The Butterfly Effect. A deeply distrubed person trying to make an impact on some level.
I want to see more of that. Those characters are mostly left in the subplot or are getting not enough screen time. At least American Psycho was a change. And The Hole at some point.]
The suspense of the movie was good, somehow even unique. We did not know if something supernatural was about to happen or not.
I admit, I was a bit sad that there was nothing supernatural, but Max made up for it.
The fact that he was laughing at some points, others have commented negative on that, made more clear what a dreaded character he was, so I needed no supernatural force.
I did not really care if Lucy and Tom would come out of there alive, but I was genuinely interested in what would happen altogether. It was a character study of them, well mostly of Lucy I felt.
About the wrecked cars: we don't know if those belonged to prior victims. Maybe Max took these cars to scare the ones that make it to the hotel?
Maybe it's a junk place where people leave their broken cars?
I am a signature. Call me George.
I think the simplest explanation is just that Max was a deeply disturbed psychopath, who got his kicks pushing "normal" people to the limit to see how far they would go.
He was sadistic, enjoying getting Lucy to tell him to kill Tom and make her feel like sh!t for finding out she was capable of doing that to another person. He was just a genuinely psychotic, sadistic person playing cat and mouse with a series of victims.
He'd done this before because he even admitted to them later in the movie that he'd set up the website, and how hard it was to get the photo of the hotel to look better than it does in real life. Basically the movie was another in the genre of where an established psycho finds new victims and lures them in.