Puzzle Box (2023)

Spooktober Challenge 2025

Premise: Kait is trying to go cold turkey and quit drugs once and for all, so her sister Olivia brings her to this airbnb in (you guessed it) the middle of nowhere so they can spend one week in isolation. Big surprise: the house is not a crappy cabin, it’s actually a nice place. Except it has this tendency to kind of play with your senses and opening the door to the bathroom might bring you to the kitchen, and all that kind of architectural shenanigans.
Under 90 minutes? yup! a bit over 70 minutes.
Do they say the title? No, we can’t have nice things.

One sentence review: Perfect assetcore horror game made for youtube streamers, but…
Okay, more: Yeah, “the house layout keeps changing!” gimmick is done charmingly well considering the obvious ultra low budget, the core idea for the movie is fun and you can try to read into the addiction/withdrawal thing easily. Unfortunately we’re dealing with one of those movies that would have worked way way better as a half an hour short, a big (and I mean big) chunk of the runtime is just opening doors that bring you to an unexpected room which kinda makes you almost not notice the cool stuff going on. And then there’s this character whose only purpose is to scream in the distance: very unsettling the first couple of times and when you finally get to see her, the problem is that it just keeps happening and becomes ridiculous. Too bad, really, I know I would have loved a more concise version of this movie.
A simple way to improve it: less screaming lady, more unsettling architectural stuff. Go bonkers, really play with what happens the next time the character opens a door, dunno.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

Followed by Puzzle Box: The Glitch (2024)

… and it looks like that’s a 7 minutes long prequel/sequel/thing? Well well well.