Throwbacks in movies are one of those tricks that can be a huge risk with the success rate being minuscule at best. We’ve seen it succeed when it is played a little tongue in cheek, like in the Kingsman series’s take on British spy movies. Or directors take the route where they openly love and mock the genre, as we see with Scream and Cabin in the Woods. What makes throwbacks so difficult to balance is if done wrong it comes off as generic, uninspired, and lazy. Amber does throwbacks like the early 2000s are in full swing and falls on its face trying to do so.

With a shuffle of short film segments and the audio being an emergency broadcast alert, a woman is shown looking for her daughter frantically at a roller rink. After giving a photo of her daughter to a detective, he begins his investigation. While the detective searches, we see the daughter was lured away by an older man into a tent where he begins to torture her. Carrying her in a sheet into his car during the day, the film cuts to the detective finding the car at night. He finds the driver’s door still open, the car still on, and a blood trail leading into the woods that he begins to follow.

If it seems like this synopsis is more bare-bones than usual, it is because the film jumps between the three perspectives (stranger with the girl, mom, and the detective) frequently making the editing feel rushed and at times sloppy. Now if you get out your 2000s checklist there is, unpleasant implied torture, a creepy girl with hair in front of her face, and a film sped up jumpscare, all of which come off as cliche and dated as can be. Surprisingly though the most distracting part of the film is the fact that the title character, Amber, isn’t a child at all and looks to be in her late teens or early twenties. While Amber isn’t awful on a technical level, aside from being far too dark near the end, it just carries all the failing of doing a short that has so many old ideas and tropes.

3 out of 10