In Richard Bates Jr.’s Tone Deaf, it is a battle of the ages as an everyday-type princess turned heroin of the Millenial generation is pitted against an aging but raging Baby Boomer. What looked like a setup for a horror turned out to be a funny and comedic AirBnB in the woods flick, one that can pull in audiences from 18 to 100 with its social commentary and light jesting at itself (and its whippersnappers vs. fogies premise).

Tone Deaf follows Olive (Amanda Crew), a 21st-century digital gal who in the span of a couple of days has been dumped by her man-child boyfriend as well as her job. Olive does not have many people to turn to since her mom ran away to a hippie commune after her father’s suicide at a young age, and her friends only being supportive when it is convenient to them. To make matters worse, unbeknownst to her she is a terrible piano player. To get her groove back, Olive decides to book a weekend stay in a house on the outskirts of a smalltown, only the renter is an older man, named Harvey (Robert Patrick), recently widowed since his wife committed suicide. As a result of her death, Harvey has become more unhinged and angered at the state of the world, and seeing an opportunity to experience what it is like to take a life, something he seemingly has always wanted to try, Harvey plots to kill his weekend tenant.

Tone Deaf is a slightly comedic hipster-thriller that is helmed by a surprisingly good cast. I was pleasantly surprised to see Ray Wise in this film, though only appearing all too briefly during an acid trip after his daughter Olive, played by Amanda Crew, purchases drugs from a gas station while on vacation. Crew gave a strong performance as the leading lady, and I felt she mainly lost believability when she delivers the oh-so Millenial lines. This abhorrent stereotyping has more to do with the writing, however, so can’t completely fault her for that. The villain is played by Robert Patrick whom we know from his infamous role as the baddie in Terminator 2, and who returns to that type-casting in Tone Deaf as Harvey, the killer widower and the voice for the Baby Boomer generation.

So this movie is pretty much a long rant of Baby Boomers on Millenials (and vice versa), a rant on the current state of living in a techno-blasted, vapid, disconnected world, a rant on dating, and on and on and on. I get that the movie was going for comedy, by having the heroin, Olive (Amanda Crew), be insufferably sarcastic and prone to eye-rolling, as well as the random and odd scenes with the townies for comedic relief, but the movie did not really come together until the last 10 minutes when it finally got to what should have naturally happened within the first half an hour — a knockdown, drag-out fight of the old vs. the young. The movie, itself, was tone-deaf in that it had poor comedic pitch discrimination; all too often the movie required me to accept the false anticipation builds and I was over them well before the movie was halfway through. Luckily this movie didn’t take itself too seriously, it is meta but for no reason and the script often calls for characters to break the 4th wall. Furthermore, events happened all too conveniently in order for the movie to be longer, and I did not appreciate the effort for comedy that writer Richard Bates Jr. tried to instill for entertainment, as the inevitable end was preceded by an unnatural journey towards it, and worse, he stuffed his heroine and baddie inside their respective boxes and firmly shut the lid on them preventing any development beyond their narrow views of the world and each other.

All in all, Tone Deaf barely scratches the surface of the social commentary it is trying to present by having poorly written dialogue, as well as lack of commitment in exploring the deep psychological issues each character is plagued. The scenes where these missing pieces could have fleshed out the film were very short, and had they been fleshed out the movie would have definitely had more substance. Instead, it rushed through them to get back to the comedy, and it should have leaned more into its horror aspects and exploring different characters’ psychoses. I did enjoy the last fun 10 minutes where things got bloody and messy, and the breakage of the 4th wall, though initially unnerving, does give this movie a certain tone of its own. I found Tone Deaf to be reminiscent of other films of this year — Blood Paradise and The Intruder; not as memorable or compelling, but Tone Deaf certainly watchable for its solid actors.