Self Help

You Sane Cult

Self Help
Directed by Erik Bloomquist 
USA 2025
Mainframe Pictures
Screened at FrightFest Saturday 23rd August 2025

Okay, so it had to happen sooner or later. My first FrightFest clunker was the third film I saw at this year’s festival, which was called Self Help.

Now it has to be said, I use clunker very loosely because it’s a film which is, to be fair, relatively engaging for a lot of its running time, has some nice shock moments and, of course, has some great performances in it, to be able to put that all over. Not least of which is the acting job done by Amy Bender as Olivia, who we see years after her accidentally murdering somebody in a clown mask when she was a little girl (which will come up again later in the plot).

Now grown up, Olivia is encouraged by her new friend Sophie, played by Madison Lintz, to accept her estranged mother’s invitation to meet her at a self actualisation programme for the week. She takes Sophie with her but when she gets there she discovers her mother, played by Amy Hargreaves, has married the self help guru running the programme, a man called Curtis Clark, played by Jake Weber.

However, it’s not long before things start to seem more than just a little off and, shortly after, Olivia finds herself accidentally partaking of some pretty dynamic self actualisation therapy herself.

Now, I don’t want to give anything away but, big shout out to Blaque Fowler as the old guy who has the most suspenseful and disturbing scene of this particular film. Like I said, the performances here were fine and this moment was, for me, the highlight of the film. The problem with that, of course, is that when you see something that is truly horrifying and it’s half way through the picture, everything else which comes after it seems kind of a let down and... I think this did affect how my mind received the rest of the movie, to be honest. I think that if that specific scene was withheld until much later in the running time, then the slow burn may have done the movie some favours, in a way. 

For me though, this one mostly held my attention but just didn’t catch my interest in the way the previous two festival films I reviewed in this year’s FrightFest did (and I didn’t even understand what the heck was going on in that second movie). Despite me not quite figuring out all the twist reveals before they happened in Self Help… which honestly is usually enough to sell me on anything… I did find it all rather run-of-the-mill, somewhat and, yeah, it just lacked the spark of oomph I was looking for, I guess.

That being said, I did love the old Max Fleisher cartoon parody over the end credits and, my interest was piqued a lot of the time. So, yeah, not really much to say about Self Help, truth be told but, it could have been a lot worse too, so, sorry for the short review and… yeah. Exit, pursued by a sense of ennui.