While adjusting to a new life in a quiet suburban community, a recently divorced mother and her two teens receive mysterious red letters instructing them each to kill or be killed.

In a society where rules are the primary element to coexist and live in peace, there will always be inhabitants who decide to go against that code because for them the rules are made to be broken. With this in mind, consider that one day someone invites you to kill a person: a family member, a friend, a neighbor. Would you do it or ignore it? And if it were a game, would you play or think it is in bad taste? This is the preamble of Red Letter Day (2019).

A morning like any other, the inhabitants of a quit suburb wake up with red envelopes inside their mailboxes in which the concept of something called “Red Letter Day” is detailed, a day in which the residents of that neighborhood are invited to kill a neighbor assigned to them in the envelope. People have the option to ignore the invitation because the humans have free will. However, there is a side note in the letter that mentions that you have to kill them before they decide to end your life.

The story unfolds with three main characters, which are members of the same family, the Edwards: Melanie (Dawn Van de Schoot), Madison (Hailey Foss), and Timothy (Kaeleb Zain Gartner). Each one received a letter, and none chose to actually carry out the plan of the sinister mind behind everything. But, life goes around a lot, and the plot too, and the three have to do anything to survive.

Red Letter Day, although at times it seems to mimic other saga-like movies like The Purge and Saw with a sort of school project feeling, it is very fresh and different. First of all, it must be understood that the events unfold within a society that does not yet accept crime as a measure to coexist and, however, the person planning this event wishes to experience at their own expense what it would be to carry out a game as presented in the sagas mentioned above.

Something interesting during the movie is the dialogues. Yes, there are tiny sequences of action for a slasher fan but what is presented is explicitly gory to meet everyone’s visual needs. Now, the dialogues are quite natural, sometimes comical with a dark tone, but it’s not pretentious nor it contains prefabricated phrases. It is a mixture of nature with socio-cultural ethical reasoning from which the director’s intentions can be deduced by wanting to show that people appear to be something that they are not behind closed doors; people only need an excuse, even if it is not consistent or legal, to bring out their true colors. Basically, in the suburbs you will always have surprising discoveries.

Red Letter Day has enough points in favor that could lead to it being considered a cult film regardless of the basic level under which it was developed. It is not a work of art, but it is supported by other examples of horror under its own thesis.