Halloween has come and gone, but like all true horror fans, for me Halloween is a mindset and a lifestyle, not a single day at the end of October, so I am happy to indulge in films set at Halloween year-round. In the case of Autumn Road I wonder why it is set at Halloween, as the film does little with the setting or the time of year to unravel its tale of…well, I’m not quite sure.

The film has good ideas to spare, but they don’t entirely link up to each other, leaving the film feeling disjointed, like it was created by committee or by improv, rather than the singular work of writer/director/star Riley Cusick.

You’ve seen the elements before: a Halloween haunt, identical-ish twins played by the same actor, a precredit death that haunts and shapes the lives of all involved, the lost and broken girl who looked for her dreams and herself in the big city, but now has come back to the dreaded hometown, and the “bad” twin starts doing bad things that the “good” twin must deal with the fallout from.  The problem is, Autumn Road never quite gels all this into a coherent and cohesive narrative. The family owns a Halloween Haunt, but the film never explores what that means thematically, other than allowing for some of the violence of the “bad” twin to play out in a spooky atmosphere. Death drive Laura away from her hometown and another death drove her back, but other than shock, she never really engages with that part of her character. Indeed, none of the characters seem to have arcs. Who is the protagonist of the film? Laura? Charlie? Both twins? Is it a bizarre love triangle between Laura and the twins? Sometimes. But just as often as not, nope.

The film starts strong. A twelve-minute precredit sequence in which young Winnie (Maddy-Lea Hendrix, giving perhaps the best performance in the film) hangs out at the local Halloween haunt, goes trick or treating, nonsensically is given a watch by an old man (“I’ve got other ways of telling time”) when she cannot eat the peanuts he is giving out because she has severe allergies, and finally meets up with Charlie. Charlie and Vincent are twins, both played by director Cusick. You can tell Charlie is the nice one because he wears glasses and is shy, and you can tell Vincent is the mean one because he looks it and wears black trench coats. Charlie eats the peanuts Winnie gives him, and then they have their first kiss, which, because of the peanuts, sends Winnie into anaphylactic shock, killing her. Charlie panics, but Vincent promises to take care of it, and hides the body so Winnie’s family has no idea what happened to her.

Last forward an indeterminant amount of years and Charlie and Vincent are now running the family business. Vincent is a hothead; Charlie is shy. Meanwhile, somewhere else (the film is ambiguous about time, location, or even the passage of time), Laura (Lorelei Linklater), Winnie’s older sister, is trying to make it as an actor. She and her roommate Jade (Maya Alexander), also an actress, decide to write a film together. The Jade gets killed walking backwards into the street when she is hit by a van. Laura returns home, but doesn’t know why. After meeting Charlie and Vincent, she goes to see her mother (Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood’s Lar Park-Lincoln) and they visit Winnie’s bedroom because that’s what people who have lost someone in movies like this do.

Along the way, Vincent fires the entire staff of the haunt, holds auditions for new performers, kills various random people who have annoyed him (including one guy on his birthday). He almost kills this older jerk, who then tracks down Charlie and puts him in the hospital. Charlie gets out of the hospital the night Laura comes to the Haunt, which she has never been through, as Vincent completes his descent into madness and shows her her sister’s corpse.  The film then rolls into a less-than-memorable ending.

As I said, there are good ideas here, and some interesting moments, but the film never lives up to its promise of the precredit sequence, which is a shame, because as I said above, I’m always looking for a good Halloween movie. Sadly, Autumn Road wasn’t it.

5 out of 10