I’m honestly not sure where to begin with the latest Shudder original, Lucky. I could draw comparisons to Happy Death Day, but that wouldn’t feel quite right. I could draw some comparisons to Hush, but that wouldn’t feel right either. Lucky is heavily allegorical, and how much you enjoy the movie depends heavily on how willing you are to suspend disbelief to parse the allegory. Even then, I didn’t enjoy it that much.

Rising horror star Brea Grant (Halloween II, A Ghost Story) not only wrote Lucky, but stars in it as protagonist May, a self-absorbed writer struggling to get her second book published. She slogs through PR events for her first book, preaching self-reliance for women as the key to survival, but with, admittedly, good reason. The night before, a man broke into her house and tried to kill her and her husband. Though she was shaken, her husband, Ted (Dhruv Uday Singh), took it in stride, claiming that this happens every night. When she got upset, Ted left, not seeming to understand why his wife is so upset when “that’s just the way things are.”

Now, May has to deal with the killer breaking in every night on her own. The police don’t seem to take her seriously, and while Ted’s sister (Kausar Mohammed) and her assistant (Yasmine Al-Bustami) offer her help, May insists she has to take her own advice and “go it alone.” But no matter how hard she fights back, no matter how much she hurts the killer, he always disappears the second she looks away. And no matter how bold the killer is, or how much of his blood May spills, the police never seem any closer to stopping him, and they always seem more concerned with the domestic situation between May and Ted.

An increasingly more frustrated May becomes increasingly more determined to face the killer on her own, quoting her own self-help words to draw strength from. But the killer finds her wherever she goes, always finding a way in no matter how carefully she locks the door, and always disappearing the moment she gets the upper hand.

The whole thing is an allegory for domestic violence, and how hard women have to fight to be taken the least bit seriously. They aren’t “lucky” at all, but fight like hell for everything they have. It’s a good message. But Grant and director Natasha Kermani inadvertently undermine their own message. Take a look back at the supporting cast. Do you notice any similarities? More importantly, compare the supporting cast and the leading lady.

Brea Grant’s May is an able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant of an upper-middle-class economic background. But her supporting cast is made up almost entirely of South Asian and Black characters. Especially when surrounded by people of ethnic minority backgrounds, May becomes harder to buy as a progressive protagonist. Lucky wants to be a progressive movie with a socially relevant message, but the casting choices cause the film to fall into the ages-old “brown men are terrorizing our white women” trope. Especially after Amazon Prime’s Them or Netflix’s His House, the racial undertones in this movie feel glaring.

I don’t believe Grant and Kermani set out to make a movie about white victimhood. The character names especially have me thinking they used a race-blind casting process, but in a movie where the entire narrative is built on allegory, the unconscious choices are important, too. That’s some high school English class-level analysis.

Of course, I could be way off. If you have Shudder already, check it out and see for yourself. But in my opinion, Lucky falls flat in its attempts to be poignant.

4 out of 10