The Resort is what happens when someone says, “Let’s make a horror movie in Hawaii for the vibes,” and then forgets to bring a script. Written and directed by Taylor Chien, the film stars Bianca Haase, Brock O’Hurn, Michael Vlamis, and Michelle Randolph, all of whom presumably thought they were signing up for a spooky island thriller and not an extended commercial for B-roll and poor decision-making. It’s 2021, the genre has moved on, and yet here we are watching adults wander around an abandoned resort like lost influencers on a haunted brand deal.
The Premise: Scooby-Doo, but Without the Dog or the Charm
The setup sounds like a basic but workable horror premise: Lex, a horror-obsessed writer, drags her three friends to a supposedly haunted, abandoned Hawaiian resort to investigate the legend of the “Half-Faced Girl.” On paper, that’s a decent logline. In execution, it feels like someone took the outline for a found-footage movie, lost the “found footage” part, and just filmed four people sightseeing until a plot reluctantly shows up. The first act is essentially an overlong travel vlog where nothing happens except foreshadowing, which is generous because that implies the movie has enough structure to foreshadow anything.
The Characters: Personality Optional
Lex is allegedly a horror fiction writer, which you can tell because people keep telling you she is. Her “expertise” never matters, her decisions are awful, and she spends most of the runtime oscillating between mild curiosity and full panic. Chris is the big, handsome guy whose main job is to hold things and exist as future demon bait. Sam is the resident goofball, the kind of friend who makes everything a joke until the script needs someone to get possessed and throttly. Bree is there to be pretty, pleasant, and tragically disposable. Together, the four of them give off the chaotic energy of a group project where no one actually read the assignment.
Hawaii, But Make It Strangely Boring
Here’s the real crime: The Resort is shot in Hawaii and still manages to look… dull. You have tropical landscapes, lush jungle, eerie ruins of an abandoned luxury hotel—and somehow the movie makes it all feel like stock footage you’d see in a travel agency that went out of business in 2006. There’s little sense of escalating atmosphere, no real use of geography, and almost zero tension built out of space. The resort never feels like a character; it barely feels like a location. It’s just a backdrop, like a green screen someone forgot to turn off.
The Half-Faced Girl: Half a Face, Quarter of a Concept
The titular Half-Faced Girl should be the central terror of the movie. Instead, she’s more of an occasional reminder that, yes, this is technically still horror. Her design is passable—distorted features, supernatural presence, the usual ghost-girl aesthetic—but she never becomes anything more than a jump scare delivery system. There’s no real mythology explored, no tragic backstory that resonates, no clever twist to her existence. She just shows up, messes with vehicles, tears faces off, and then retreats back into being a concept the film hopes you’ll find scarier than it actually is.
Death Scenes by Randomized Chaos
The kills in The Resort feel like they were brainstormed in a five-minute Zoom call. Bree’s death, for example, involves a possessed security car locking her inside and then driving itself off a balcony. That’s not so much terrifying as it is weirdly cartoonish. Sam’s possession, strangling attempt, scissor-neck stabbing, and eventual face-rip from the Half-Faced Girl should be horrific; instead it plays like the movie is checking off boxes labeled “possession,” “stab,” and “facial mutilation” with all the emotional investment of a grocery list. Chris’s sacrifice in the elevator is one of those noble, dramatic gestures that might have landed if we cared even slightly about him as a person and not just as “the big guy who lifts things.”
Pacing: Ninety Minutes of “Wait, That’s It?”
The film’s structure is a mess. It spends far too long on nothing—friends goofing off, wandering, taking photos, messing around—only to slam through its horror in a rushed, choppy final stretch. By the time the supernatural events ramp up, the movie is already limping toward the finish line, desperately trying to convince you that the last ten minutes of chaos make up for the previous hour of empty wandering. Instead of a slow burn, you get a long yawn followed by someone shouting “BOO” and then rolling credits.
Lex the Narrator: Unreliable and Uninteresting
The entire story is framed as Lex recounting the events from a hospital bed to a skeptical detective. This could’ve been a clever device, adding psychological doubt and layering in the question of what really happened. Instead, it’s used like a lazy shortcut: whenever the movie needs to wrap up the nonsense it’s presented, Lex just explains it in a weary monologue. The problem is, she has all the charisma of a podcast host who forgot to hit record the first time and is now re-telling the story with half the energy.
The Twist: You Never Left… the Cliché
The big twist—Lex realizing she never actually left the resort and is still trapped there—is the cinematic equivalent of a shrug. It’s a twist we’ve seen countless times in better films, and The Resort adds nothing new to it. The moment where she snaps out of her hospital fantasy, the walls crumble, and she’s back in the resort is supposed to be mind-bending. Instead, it just confirms what you already suspected: this movie has no idea how to end, so it reached into the horror cliché grab bag and pulled out “It was all still happening.” Congratulations, you’re stuck. Not just Lex—us too.
The Detective, the Veins, and the “Gotcha”
There’s a tiny attempt at a stinger when Lex notices the detective’s veiny, possessed look through her camera just before reality collapses. It’s meant to be unsettling, hinting that the Half-Faced Girl’s influence is broader than the island. But because the film never bothers to establish any rules for its ghost or its possession mechanics, it just feels like a random detail tossed in to create fake depth. Is the detective real? Is he part of the illusion? Is this all some purgatorial loop? The movie doesn’t care enough to decide, and by that point, neither do you.
Horror Without the Horror
The biggest sin The Resort commits is being aggressively unscary. The jump scares are telegraphed, the tension is nonexistent, and the characters make such consistently stupid decisions that you start rooting for the Half-Faced Girl out of sheer frustration. The movie seems convinced that an exotic setting and a few gory moments are enough to carry an entire feature, forgetting that horror thrives on build-up, character investment, and imagination. You can’t just throw pretty people into a pretty place and call it a day.
Final Verdict: Check Out Early
The Resort is less a horror film and more a cautionary tale about assuming a cool location will do all the heavy lifting. It wastes its Hawaiian setting, underwrites its characters, and squanders its central ghost on a string of uninspired scares and a limp twist. If you’re looking for a tight, eerie vacation nightmare, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for proof that not every urban legend needs a movie, congratulations—you’ve found your case study.
In the end, the only truly haunting thing about The Resort is the sinking realization that watching it cost you 75 minutes you’ll never get back. The Half-Faced Girl may stalk the abandoned hotel, but the real horror is staring at the screen and thinking, “I could have just rewatched literally anything else.”
