Till Death, the Megan Fox thriller is surprisingly pretty good! Part home-invasion thriller, part fable about the oppressive, inescapable confines of an unhappy marriage, it’s a taut, briskly paced little genre movie that has a decent helping of twists and turns along the way to its bloody conclusion. Let’s unpack those things here.
First, premise: Fox plays Emma, who is so unhappily married to her wealthy but emotionally abusive husband Mark that she’s having an affair with one of his employees, Tom. Mark’s the kind of guy who wants to tell his wife what to wear and remind her constantly how he “rescued” her – his words – from a penniless career as a photographer.
He’s also sharp enough to have figured out the extra-marital fun going on under his nose, so he whisks Emma away to their secluded lake house for anniversary celebrations that quickly become a macabre revenge plot, with Emma handcuffed to Mark’s corpse after he puts a bullet in his own head.
Mark has planned all this out. There are no more bullets in the gun he used to kill himself, and all the sharp implements have been removed from the house. Emma’s phone is destroyed in a vase of water and there are no other means of communication in or indeed around the house.
She’s isolated, covered in blood, surrounded by miles of snow and frozen water, and about to become the target of hired thugs. And she still has no idea why any of this is really happening.
A voicemail message left for her by Mark, which she discovers when she finally makes her way to the car (which has been drained of petrol), gives some of the reasoning away – Mark was aware of Emma’s affair.
The subsequent arrival of Tom, summoned by Mark himself posing as Emma, gives away the rest. Mark’s firm had been tampering with evidence on a wide scale, and he was about to face unavoidable personal repercussions. Being an obvious coward, he couldn’t face those repercussions, but he also couldn’t allow Emma to be happy in his absence.
Hence the arrival of Bobby and Jimmy, who show up and kill Tom before pursuing Emma all around the house. Emma has a history with Bobby, who attacked her a decade prior, and she met Mark when he got her assailant convicted. In a cruel turn, now he has not only finessed that assailant’s release from prison but hired him and his brother to rob the lake house, which ostensibly contains a safe housing a fortune in diamonds.
Thus begins a tense game of cat-and-mouse, with Emma trying to free herself from the literal and figurative shackles of her marriage while also trying to evade Bobby and Jimmy, who eventually capture her regardless and gear up to torture her for the code the house’s safe.
She insists on being freed in exchange for this information, which the two agree to, but when Bobby opens the safe he discovers nothing inside but a bone saw and a note explaining that the diamonds he’s looking for are “close to her heart” – in other words, in the steel necklace Mark gave her as an 11-year anniversary gift, which can’t be opened.
The Saw-style twist here is that Mark wants Bobby and Jimmy to cut off Emma’s head and get the necklace that way.
Jimmy, though, who is the more reluctant of the two, isn’t having that. He and his brother argue and then fight, but Jimmy is killed when Bobby inadvertently hangs him from a coat hook by the back of his head. It’s a brutal moment – especially when his weight pulls the hook off the wall – that sends Bobby into a frenzy.
Emma is able to fight him off and cuff him to Mark’s corpse, but he continues to pursue her, dragging the body of her husband around with him. Outside, they fight on the icy surface of the lake, and all three bodies plunge beneath the frigid surface. Emma stabs Bobby in the eye and Mark’s corpse pulls him to the bottom like an anchor.
While Emma almost drowns in the water, she can break through the ice and claw her way back to the surface, removing her wedding ring and throwing it into the water for good measure as she lays back and waits for the distant police sirens to reach her.
