THE RUSE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Ruse, Seismic Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 15, 2025

It's not a great sign when a movie needs to devote about ten minutes to a character bluntly explaining everything that has happened until that point in its story. That's what happens during the anti-climactic finale of The Ruse, which offers up about half a dozen possible answers to its central mystery until that point. Somehow, writer/director Stevan Mena manages to combine a certain number of those into a solution that makes even less sense than whichever one the audience might guess along the way.

Beyond that one, the biggest problem, perhaps, is that Mena doesn't even treat this as a mystery for a while. That might explain why that scene featuring a lengthy monologue and multiple flashbacks is more or less a necessity for the plot to make even a bit of sense. Mostly, this plays as a horror movie, with ineffectual scares and, with a cast filled with apparent red herrings, no real sense that our protagonist could be in any danger.

She's Dale (Madelyn Dundon), a nurse who gets a second chance at her career as an at-home caregiver following a fatal mistake on her last assignment. An older woman named Olivia (Veronica Cartwright) is in desperate need of in-home care, given that she has dementia and a lung condition that makes breathing on her own impossible. Her previous nurse, a woman named Tracy (Kayleigh Ruller), left Olivia with no notice, and a brief prologue has that character going through the motions of any given introduction to a horror story. She wanders the house at night, undresses a bit, and doesn't notice that someone else, provided a first-person perspective a la any horror-movie stalker, is in the house until she turns and gasps.

Our assumption, of course, is that the previous nurse was abducted or killed, and Dale, leaving behind an unsympathetic and unsupportive boyfriend at home for her stay with Olivia, eventually suspects that her predecessor's absence was not the result of the nurse's choosing. There are two main suspects: neighbor Tom (Michael Steger), a single father with a shadowy past who took an interest in Tracy, and Jacob (T.C. Carter), who works at a local grocery store who also had a thing for the previous nurse.

Both men are creepy enough that it's kind of a surprise how long it takes Det. Burke (Michael Bakkensen) to show up at the house, start to think that Tracy's disappearance might involve foul play, and consider that maybe the guy with the questionable past and the obvious peeper might be worth investigating. By the way, that list is in order, and it takes quite a long time in between the police detective getting from one step to the next—even after Dale tells him exactly why he should maybe give either of the men a first glance of suspicion.

In the meantime, Olivia's behavior becomes erratic enough—insisting that things are arranged a specific way, becoming angry at Dale for no reason, believing that her dead husband's ghost haunts the house—that we might start thinking she could have something to do with the nurse's disappearance. In terms of the mystery, that's the whole game here—to keep us guessing and second-guessing. After a certain point, the whole process becomes tiresome, because none of these possibilities seems entirely plausible, and since there aren't too many characters in this tale, it keeps cycling through those same possibilities repeatedly.

That, again, is when the movie is actually in mystery mode, which is less frequently than one might anticipate for this kind of plot. Instead, we get a lot of scenes that repeat what happens in the prologue, only with Dale wandering the house at night, hearing noises, being startled by people who pop into frame in completely harmless ways, and, for some reason at a key moment in the story, following a wire to discover the source of something, instead of simply going into a different room to actually discover the truth she wants to learn. If that sounds a bit too vague, be glad the description doesn't go into any more detail, because the scene is confounding enough on its own—without trying to come up with any kind of justification for it to happen the way it does.

There isn't one, of course. The mystery behind The Ruse has to unfold in such a specific way for it to function, including how and to whom that final explanation is being told, that the whole thing goes from improbable and implausible to feeling like an impossible thing, indeed.

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