The Price We Pay is the sort of horror movie that takes one look at “crime thriller” and says, “Cute. Now bring in the dungeon, the bone saw, and the giant woman with an electrified bat.” Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura and starring Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff, this 2022 splatter-thriller is a lean, nasty, darkly funny ride that starts as a botched robbery movie and then politely swan-dives into surgical grindhouse hell.
It’s not about subtlety. It’s about consequences: for bad choices, bad men, and anyone foolish enough to accept a ride to a mysterious farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
From Pawn Shop Robbery to Rural Butchery
The setup is classic “wrong place, wrong people, deeply wrong house.” Grace, played by Gigi Zumbado, is just trying to sort out her payments with a pawn shop owner when three criminals—Alex (Emile Hirsch), Cody (Stephen Dorff), and Alex’s brother Shane—burst in with guns, attitude, and not nearly enough planning.
Within minutes, things escalate: the owner shoots Shane, Alex kills the owner, and a poor shop worker discovers that cooperating with armed robbers does not qualify you for hazard pay. Grace witnesses it all and instantly becomes “loose end with a driver’s license,” so she’s kidnapped and forced to help them escape.
Unfortunately for everyone, her car has the same work ethic as the gang’s getaway driver and promptly dies. Enter Danny, a sweet young farmhand who agrees to let them wait at his family farmhouse. This is the moment where any seasoned horror fan starts yelling, “No. Not the farmhouse. Anything but the farmhouse.” And the movie, grinning, replies: “Oh, we’re going in.”
Meet the Family: The Doctor, the Giant, and the Dungeon
Once we reach the farm, The Price We Pay stops flirting with horror and goes full, unapologetic exploitation. Danny’s “doctor” grandfather turns out to be a black-market organ harvester with a fully equipped underground torture hospital. His other pride and joy? Jodi, a towering, disfigured granddaughter with a bandaged face, an electrified bat, and the energy of someone who has never had a healthy coping mechanism in her life.
The film cleverly pivots genres here: the heist plot becomes a setup, not the story. The real show is the family business under the house, where kidnapped victims are carved up, cataloged, and sold like top-shelf cuts. The kidnapped sex worker we see at the beginning, Grace’s captivity, the dingy dungeon—all of it clicks into place around the Doctor’s monologue about how “men like them” hurt his daughter and ruined Jodi’s life. His solution? Organ redistribution with extreme prejudice.
Is it morally sound? No. Is it narratively satisfying to see violent thieves strapped to tables while a grandpa with a god complex talks about kidneys like they’re collectibles? Absolutely.
Bad Men, Worse Fate: Poetic Justice With a Scalpel
One of the film’s strengths is how unashamedly it leans into karmic punishment. Alex, the trigger-happy wild card, gets the worst of it: the Doctor calmly notes that his organs are ruined from drug abuse, but hey, at least his eyes are in good working condition. Then out come the eyes. Horror with a lesson: you can outrun the cops, but not your lab results.
Shane gets it even worse—awake on the table, organs splayed, heart removed while the Doctor explains his tragic backstory like he’s giving a lecture. Cody, the relatively more rational one, hangs on longer, but no one in the Dirk gang is walking out of this farmhouse with all their pieces attached.
It’s grindhouse morality: you can rob, threaten, and shoot people all you like, but if you wander onto the wrong property, your insides become somebody’s retirement plan.
Grace: Final Girl With Zero Time for This
Gigi Zumbado’s Grace is the movie’s secret weapon. She starts the story as collateral damage, dragged along by killers who fully intend to kill her once she’s not useful. But once she’s strapped to the Doctor’s operating table, she graduates from victim to co-author of the chaos.
Her scenes are some of the most fun: cutting herself loose with a scalpel Danny slides her way, attacking the Doctor, turning his own tools and environment against him. The compressed gas canister gag—where the tank flies across the room and explodes the Doctor’s head into the wall—is the kind of creatively nasty kill that makes you both wince and clap. Problem solved, OSHA violation achieved.
Grace isn’t written as a superhero; she’s scared, angry, and very much out of her depth, but she’s also practical and ruthless when she has to be. By the time she’s wrapping barbed wire around Jodi’s face and wielding a scythe like she’s been training for this moment her whole life, you’re fully onboard.
Danny: The Most Reluctant Accomplice in Horror
Danny is a surprisingly layered presence in this parade of human wreckage. At first, he seems like a naive farm kid trying to be polite to strangers. Then we realize he’s deeply enmeshed in the family operation—helping manage victims, hooking Grace up to an IV while assuring her it “won’t be painful.” That’s… not comforting, Danny.
But he’s also the one drawing a moral line: he cares about Grace, pushes back against his grandfather’s cruelty, and eventually turns against Jodi and the family altogether. He’s the embodiment of horror’s favorite question: “If you grow up in a nightmare, how long before you become part of it?” In Danny’s case, not forever. With a little push (and a lot of adrenaline injections), he ends up helping Grace fight back, staple Cody shut, and weaponize farm equipment against his giant homicidal sister.
Jodi: Boss Fight With an Electrified Bat
Let’s be honest: Jodi steals every scene she’s in. Played by Amazon Eve, she’s an instant cult-horror icon: massive, disfigured, emotionally feral, and armed with a bat that crackles with electricity and unresolved trauma. She doesn’t talk much, but she doesn’t really need to. Her whole vibe is: “I’m going to kill you because I’ve had a very bad decade.”
The final showdown—with tranquilizer darts, dissolving solution, barbed wire, and a scythe—feels like the third-act boss fight of an especially mean-spirited video game. The wire-tightening decapitation as she screams “Brother!” is grisly, ridiculous, and weirdly tragic. You almost feel bad for her, right up until you remember she’s been using human beings as enrichment toys.
Gore, Tone, and the Joy of Going Too Far
Ryuhei Kitamura doesn’t do subtle horror, and The Price We Pay is gloriously in line with that reputation. The gore is plentiful and practical-feeling: exposed organs, heads exploding, surgery in awful close-up, bodies treated like puzzles to be taken apart. If you’re squeamish, this movie is a firm “no.” If you love old-school splatter with a mean streak and a bit of dark humor, it’s a very enthusiastic “yes.”
The film’s tone is where the dark humor lives: not in winking jokes, but in the sheer audacity of its cruelty and creativity. From the Doctor’s clinical explanations to Cody asking to be stapled back together so he can keep going, it’s full of moments that are as funny as they are horrifying—if your sense of humor is sufficiently deranged.
Final Verdict: Four Organs on Ice Out of Five
The Price We Pay isn’t trying to be elevated horror. It’s here to be nasty, fast, and fun in the bleakest way possible—a collision of crime thriller, torture farmhouse, and revenge-from-the-wrong-family story. Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff bring gritty energy to their doomed criminals, Vernon Wells is memorably vile as the Doctor, and Gigi Zumbado and Tyler Sanders anchor the third act with genuine tension and messy, bloody catharsis.
If you like your horror mean, gory, and tinged with dark, ironic justice, this is a vicious little gem. It reminds you that sometimes the real “price we pay” for our worst choices isn’t prison, or guilt, or morality. Sometimes, it’s waking up on a metal table in a basement while a kindly old man in a lab coat explains just how much your organs are worth.
