SELF-HELP - Mark Reviews Movies

Self-Help, Mainframe Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 30, 2025

Fraternal screenwriters Erik and Carson Bloomquist (with the first also directing) are on to something with Self-Help. It's a horror tale set inside a secretive self-help group (obviously), which promises to aid people to overcome some perceived flaw in themselves or real problem in their lives. The whole thing turns out to be eerie enough without our first introduction to the group showing them all wearing creepy masks.

The masks, though, kind of point toward how torn this movie's approach ends up being. When it focuses on the allure and exploitation of this sort of operation, the material can be genuinely unsettling. That, apparently, isn't enough for the filmmakers, who still feel the need to give us seemingly random violence or scenes that feel as if they belong in an entirely different movie.

As an example, there's the prologue, which looks as if it's going to take us down the usual route of some horror-movie introduction. An unseen man at an arcade/pizzeria grabs a clown mask before luring a woman away from her family into a back room of the joint. In a tantalizing twist of expectations, though, the inevitable death in the scene is the random clown's, while the killer is the woman's young daughter, who is angered by the sight of her mother and some stranger in a compromising position.

The girl grows up, and Olivia (Landry Bender) is now in college, hasn't seen her mother in some time, and has plans to meet up with her at a self-help retreat. Olivia clearly doesn't want to go, but her new best friend Sophie (Madison Lintz), who's joining her, makes a point to try to keep Olivia on schedule. For no particular reason, this might be a good time to mention that, given the movie's first twist, several of the attempted ones that follow aren't nearly as or at all surprising.

The leader of this group—which isn't at all a cult, as he and everyone who has literally bought into the program keep saying in a way that sounds very cultish—is Curtis Clark (Jake Weber). He wears a mask, just like the participants, when Olivia and Sophie arrive at the house in the middle of nowhere where the weekend-long session will be held. The fake face is either that of a hippie stoner or the figurehead of the most popular religion on the planet, and either way, it doesn't bode well for Curtis' sincerity or the efficacy of his program. The pile of duffel bags in the corner, each one filled with an unspecified but obviously substantial amount of cash, is surely another sign that something isn't above-board with the guy.

The only real question, then, is how bad this weekend will go. For Olivia, it's very bad, since she learns that her recently widowed mother, who has changed her name to Rebecca (Amy Hargreaves), and Curtis have married. She is, in other words, a true believer in the leader's methods, which are so non-specific and sort-of do-it-yourself that the screenplay can basically make them up as the story unfolds.

Some of them are as weird as Olivia walking in on her mother and new stepfather in an even more uncompromising position than the one Rebecca was in with the clown. Others are as oddly random as Andy (Blaque Fowler), an older man who wants to find "perspective" at the end of his experience, deciding that a blindfold isn't enough of an obstacle for one exercise. Clearly, he isn't looking for any kind of literal perspective out of this program.

The basic idea here is sound, as the story explores how desperate people looking for easy answers to hard questions about their lives and potential shortcomings are willing and able to behave, well, desperately. There's Joanne (Carol Cadby), as another example, who is, through some very vague back story (Considering how few characters there are here, much of their back stories is left an open question), revealed to be estranged from her family. Instead of dealing with it, Curtis essentially tries to help her forget everything about them, throwing a locket in a fire and taking an extreme approach when it comes to a tattooed reminder on her arm.

The biggest drawback to the movie, though, is that all of its ideas remain fairly basic. The not-a-cult group—that's obviously a cult or something just as harmful to its participants—is a concept in need of some underlying structure and, perhaps, some more specific ideology to feel genuinely sinister. The violence, suspense, and scares often feel unmotivated, such as when Olivia is chased around the property by someone (There is a reason for that, at least, although it's a stretch for a couple of better ones).

Ultimately, this is about Olivia, her past, and the things she has tried to hide about and repress within herself. That, too, is a neat idea, although how and why a couple of characters want to bring that out of her makes little sense once the story's final revelation arrives. Self-Help can be disturbing, but it's only so in strokes too broad to really succeed as either a psychological thriller it wants to be or the straightforward horror movie it occasionally tries to be.

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