MATCH (2025)

Streaming exclusively on Shudder!
Directed by Danishka Esterhazy.
Written by Al Kaplan, Jon Kaplan.
Check out the trailer here!!

After a bad run of matches on dating apps, Paola (Humberly González) finally thinks she has met Mr. Right. The problem is Henry (Luke Volker) has an immune disease, preventing him from going out to dinner. But Henry is willing to cook a meal for Paola at his house for their first date. Sounds sketchy, huh? That’s what Paola’s sister Maria (Shaeane Jimenez) thinks. Paola, though, has a good feeling about this guy and decides to go on the date. When she arrives, Paola meets Lucille (Dianne Simpson), Henry’s mother, who lives with Henry and tells Paola that Henry is out for a bit. This is the beginning of the date from the worst pits of hell—a date Paola may not survive.

From Danishka Esterhazy, who was the director of three pretty solid films; the SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE remake, LEVEL 16, and THE BANANA SPLITZ MOVIE. Well, ok two good ones and THE BANANA SPLITZ MOVIE, which isn’t a bad track record. I’d add MATCH to that list of decent little efforts from the director. Sure, dating horror is a tired subgenre. I didn’t even bother with DROP, which looked absolutely awful. And while I thought the recently released THE DEAD THING was decent, I feel the whole dating app culture to be pretty revolting. No, I’ve never used an app to get a date and no, I probably never will. But many people do, so writing a horror film around it is an okay area to twist, I guess.

Now, I get it that the main reason dating horror films are popular is because it is a huge risk for women (and men, for that matter) to just go on a date with an absolute stranger. I just wouldn’t do that, so it doesn’t really bother me that much. But because people do, it’s understandable that this would be ripe material for the plucking. I think the reason why I liked MATCH was because it speeds past the cliched bad date montage and just drops our heroine in the middle of a perilous and twisted situation—spending the rest of the movie focusing on Paola’s multiple attempts to escape this house of horrors. Henry is not who he seems. I know, SHOCKER! I don’t think this is a spoiler as the entire film hinges on this fact and you find that out within the first twenty minutes of the movie. Henry is a monster; a hunchbacked madman with a snake-like penis, looking to please his mother by impregnating his date and giving his mother some mutant grandkids to cuddle. So yeah, MATCH isn’t one of those safe films. It’s got some grunge on it and because of that, I kind of dug it.

Now, while I don’t like dating app horror, I do like twisted, inbred killer family horror, a subgenre introduced to me in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and I’ve loved it ever since. There’s just something about the way these strange, mutant families work together and have their own roles that fascinates me and the family in MATCH has a fascinating way of interacting with one another. It’s twisted. It’s warped. And it’s wrong as all get out. But still, it is interesting to me how it seems this family works together against the world and if not for this one final girl, they would have been continuing to function that way far into the future. MATCH takes a lot of time allowing us to get to know this awful and demented little family unit and it is what made the movie watchable for me.

Paola is not the sharpest knife in the arsenal. She isn’t written very smartly and the script has her kind of tooling around the house for a little too long, avoiding Henry’s wrath. Humberly González is perfectly ok in the role and is definitely easy on the eyeballs, but she just isn’t really written as a smart person or at least, given something smart to do. The simple fact that she thinks it’s a good idea to go to a complete stranger’s house on a first date is indication that Paola isn’t known for her wits. Still, compared to the rest of the freaks in this movie, Paola is the most likable of the bunch. Dianne Simpson as Lucille is fun to watch as she cackles with glee as Henry goes on a rampage and screams at him like the Chef in TCM when he fails. Simpson does a great job at being bad. And Jacques Adriaanse, who plays the real Henry, makes the monster pitiful and sensitive one minute/a rampaging monster the next. And the design of this monster is quite original and gross.

I don’t want to assume, but I do feel that if you are the type that takes a chance on a dating app, you’re not going to like this. I feel the dating app horror is a little bit lightweight and the horror involved in MATCH certainly is heavier than that. There’s incest. There’s masturbation. There’s rape. There’s mutilation. And there’s a hunchback with a giant penis. So yeah, this isn’t what I’d call PG horror you take your gal pal to on a date. But if you like twisted horror that makes you shake your head and say under your breath, “That’s just damn wrong,” then MATCH might be the right kind of wrong for you.