COMPULSION (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Compulsion, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

As odd as it may sound, there's something admirable about the pure sleaziness of writer/director Neil Marshall's Compulsion. Modern movies seem to have moved past and forgotten a time when nudity, sex, and bloody violence could be enough for a questionably fun time at the movies. Marshall hasn't forgotten that way of telling a lurid story, obviously, and if this movie had any convincing element and made a lick of sense, it might have been a cheap, tawdry good time, too.

Instead, no one's heart or mind seems to be in it, or at least, the movie, clearly shot for cheap in Malta, doesn't make us believe anyone within it in front of or behind the camera is particularly competent at their jobs. The actors, made up of a diverse and jarring collection of dialects, aren't to blame entirely, although it's apparent that Marshall has cast them more for how they look than their acting skills.

Our protagonist, for example, is Evie (Anna-Maria Sieklucka), a very pretty visitor to the island country who has what some might consider to be an excessive bathing schedule. She's in the shower or, in one especially unnecessary moment, cleaning herself in the hot tub more often than one would think is required here. For this sort of movie, though, such a regimen is a necessity, since the whole point is that Sieklucka, her co-star, and a few other cast members are naked as often as possible.

That's the movie's game, and while it's quite silly, we at least can understand the base appeal. Sieklucka, who's Polish and has that accent, is sometimes accompanied by her co-star Charlotte Kirk, who is British and plays Evie's neighbor Diana—"like the dead princess," she adds upon introducing herself. Initially, the two women flirt a lot, because Evie is a lesbian and Diana's sexuality is entirely dependent upon how she's feeling at the moment.

Eventually, they spend some time in bikinis together, before Evie watches from her bedroom as Diana and her current beau Reese (Zach McGowan, an American) has sex against a tall window. Diana knows Evie can see them, and Evie very, very much enjoys the show. There's a post-coital shot here where the two actors look as if they're staring directly down the barrel of the camera, almost as if to ask the audience if they enjoyed the show.

The problem isn't necessarily that the movie indulges in this material, because, again, movies generally seem to have ignored the idea that they could be sexy. No, the problem is that we can see Marshall desperately trying to make his movie sexy, but in the process, the dialogue ends up so clunky, the sex is staged so awkwardly, that there's no real sense of chemistry between anyone on screen.

We haven't even arrived at the plot yet, since everyone is so busy coming and only going when they're killed. It involves a mysterious murderer, dubbed the Maltese Phantom by the press after a shot from some security camera footage is leaked. The killer slashes a man—who's in the shower at the time, naturally—to death in the opening scene.

While Evie and Diana go about their business, a pair of detectives, one (played by Giulia Gorietti) with an Italian accent and another (played by Harvey Dean) with a different British dialect from Kirk's, try to track down the killer. All they know is that the murderer must be a woman between the ages of 18 and 40-something, but conveniently for the cops and inconveniently for the two, Evie and Diana are apparently the only two people on the island who match that description.

There's another plot, entirely forgotten at a certain point, in which it turns out that Diana and Reese are actually trying to steal from Evie, who's staying in her wealthy stepfather's summer home. Reese owes some bad men a lot of money, and that entire story thread comes to a complete end with a grisly and intentionally ridiculous scene of violence that just keeps going and going, until we start to wonder if the rest of the movie is just going to be the victim rising from the apparent dead.

The third act is more ludicrous still in ways that wouldn't be fair to reveal. Even so, Marshall's script is so loose in terms of its logistics that it genuinely does come across as if he's deciding which obvious twist should be the correct one in the editing room. Compulsion wants to be cheap, sexy, and brutal fun, and the filmmakers got the first descriptor right, at least.

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