Kate Beacom and Louis Legge's Rehab Cabin is Misery for the Lindsey Lohan generation. Best friends Chloe and Dominic are at odds when Dominic decides to return to college after deferring for a year to hang out with Chloe, the immature, manipulative, and often insufferable antihero of the story. As Dominic starts to pull away, Chloe is grasping at straws to keep him home with her. When the pair are helping Chloe’s dad out by driving for his limo service, their favorite former child star and current public spectacle, Amanda Campbell drunkenly stumbles into their limo, mistaking it for her own. Chloe (and, to an extent, Dominic) takes this as a sign, the perfect opportunity for Chloe to bond with Dominic: they’re going to kidnap her. Chloe convinces Dominic that alcoholic Amanda must be rehabilitated so that she can return to her former movie star glory, and the only way to do this is by bringing her to Dominic’s family cabin and showing her a simpler, sober lifestyle, which Chloe gleefully dubs “Rehab Cabin”.
As the situation spirals out of control, Chloe unravels with it. Real-life Amanda doesn’t live up to the little girl who Chloe has grown up worshipping in her movies, and when Amanda starts to bond with Dominic in captivity, Chloe’s jealousy flares and the movie takes a dark turn. Small things begin to chip away at Chloe’s deluded mind: the arrival of the cabin’s groundskeeper, the imagined exclusion, and Dominic taking the wrong side in the time-honored debate of NSYNC vs. Backstreet Boys. Watching Chloe devolve from laughably whiny into cruel, violent, and truly maniacal character had us holding our breath, nervous to see her next move. Lacey Jeka’s nail-biting performance as Chloe masterfully makes your skin crawl and gets the audience invested in her thoroughly unlikable character. This movie is full of biting commentary on the entitlement of the public to the private and personal aspects of celebrities' lives and asks us to take a hard look at the smaller acts of misguided saviorism we engage in. Rehab Cabin is available on iTunes today, check it out here!
header photo courtesy of Rehab Cabin
Margo Moran is a rising senior at Syracuse University studying Communication and Rhetorical Studies and Political Science with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Class.
