“It’s a weekend of no consequences.”

That’s a phrase that is uttered many times over the course of the 2011 film, The Spring Break Murders (which is also known as To.Get.Her.)  In fact, it’s a phrase that’s uttered so many times that I actually started to get sick of hearing it.  Initially, I thought that it was evidence of lazy writing and that the film’s director and screenwriter, Erica Dunton, was so oddly proud of the phrase that she was determined to push it on us whether it actually meant anything or not.

By the end of the film, my opinion had changed.  There’s a big twist in The Spring Break Murders, one that took me totally by surprise and which I’m still thinking about as I write up this review.  Needless to say, I can’t reveal the twist here in this review.  But I can say that it’s a good one and it’s worth the wait and, by the end of it, you’ll understand why the characters were so fixated on that phrase.  By the end of the film, “It’s a weekend of no consequences” goes from being a cliche to a truly brilliant piece of dialogue.

The Spring Break Murders tells the story of five friends and one eventful weekend.  At the start of the movie, a voice-over informs us that, by the end of the weekend, only one of the friends will still be alive and the four others will be dead at the hands of one man.  The five friends have flown in from all over so that they can spend the weekend at a beach house owned by the mother of Ana Frost (Jazzy de Liser).  Ana is apparently a bit of a problem child.  Haunted by her father’s suicide, she hates her mother’s fiancee, Robert (Ed Wagenseller), and is secretly paying for the entire weekend with his credit card.  (She even bought everyone’s plane tickets.)  Robert is supposed to be staying at the beach house with Ana while Ana’s mother has a weekend to herself but Ana sharply informs him that he will be spending the weekend at a hotel.  Though angered, Robert agrees.  At first, it’s tempting to assume that Ana is just a spoiled brat but, as with everything in this movie, there’s more to it than that and nothing is what it first seems.

All five of the friends have their own issues that they’re dealing with.  One of them has just discovered that she won’t be attending Oxford.  Another one blames herself for death of her sister.  The token religious girl is scared to come out to her parents while the pregnant girl has been dumped by her boyfriend and has been overly medicated by her family.  And, at first, it’s easy to roll your eyes at the fact that everyone has at least one dramatic problem.  As I watched these five friends acting miserable in a nightclub, I found myself wondering if I really wanted to watch a movie about the type of depressing and overly dramatic people who I usually mute on twitter.  But I kept watching because I suspected there was more to the story than was immediately apparent.

And it turned out that I was right.  There’s a lot more to the story.  Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what it is without spoiling the film.  What I can tell you is that this is a film that worth sticking with.  During the film’s first half (which can seem unfocused before you learn the film’s twist), you may be tempted to stop watching but stick with it because almost everything that initially seems self-indulgent pays off in the end.  Though both of this film’s titles — To.Get.Her and The Spring Break Murders — might make it sound like a generic horror film, it’s actually an intriguing mystery with a clever twist.  It’s a movie that sicks with you.  I imagine that I’ll be thinking about it for days to come.

That said, it’s not a perfect film.  There’s a subplot about Ana’s mother cheating on Robert that never really makes much sense and the pace lags whenever the attention is taken away from the friends and given to any of the film’s other characters.  There are also a few flashbacks that, occasionally, feel a bit awkward, as if they’ve been forced into the action.  As one might expect from a low-budget independent film, some of the actors are better than others.  Jazzy de Lisser is a stand-out and she gets good support from Chelsea Logan, who plays the pregnant friend.  The rest of the cast is a bit more uneven.  In the end, though, this is an effectively clever little film and one that will reward repeat viewings.