To be adrift in one’s own life is a particular kind of haunting, a state of purgatorial stillness. Dale, a hospice nurse suspended in the quiet shame of professional probation, is dispatched to a place that perfectly mirrors her own stasis.
Her assignment of penance is a remote house on the Maine coast, a landscape where the salt-scrubbed air feels ancient and the sea gnaws at the shore with patient, granite teeth. The house itself is a sepulcher of memories, a place of architectural silence where the past has settled like a fine dust on every surface.
The immediate mystery is the previous caregiver, a woman who simply dissolved into this silence, leaving behind only the faintest ripple of unease. Inside, Dale discovers her charge, Olivia, the ghost of a maestro who once commanded the world’s great orchestras.
Now, she is a woman commanded by the twin tyrannies of dementia and disease, a fading monarch tethered to the hiss of an oxygen machine. Her prior fame is a faint echo against the walls of her confinement, and she speaks of her dead husband’s spirit walking the halls, a phantom in a house already crowded with them.
A Beautiful Vessel, A Muffled Cry
The film’s soul is captured first by the eye, in a visual language that speaks with a clarity the script never achieves. Cory Geryak’s cinematography finds a severe, ascetic beauty in the Maine coast, rendering its impersonal majesty with a painterly calm.
The light hits the water and the weathered shingles of the house with a truthfulness that feels profound. The camera frames the characters within this lucid, beautiful prison, the seaside vistas and sweeping aerial shots emphasizing their smallness against a natural world indifferent to their struggles. This visual elegance gives the setting a palpable weight.
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Yet this carefully composed world is broken by what we hear, or fail to hear. The sound design is a persistent impediment, a gauze placed over the spoken word that forces one to lean in, to strain for meaning that remains just out of reach.
It is a frustrating technical flaw that becomes an unintended metaphor for the broken communication that defines the story. The score, by director Stevan Mena, often acts as a prodding finger, an external force imposing unearned swells of emotion and predictable stings. It tells the audience what to feel, rather than allowing feeling to arise organically from the quiet, suffocating dread of the house itself.
An Echo and Its Emptiness
In the center of this decaying world sits Veronica Cartwright’s Olivia, a performance that is less an impersonation of illness and more a harrowing portrait of existential collapse. Cartwright offers a masterclass in disintegration, a study in the terror of the self coming undone.
It is in the details: a flicker of sharp recognition in her eyes before it is swallowed by a wave of confusion; a voice that shifts from the imperious command of a conductor to the thin whimper of a lost child. She shows us the ghost of the powerful woman she was, rattling the cage of the failing body she has become. It is a magnificent, dignified portrayal of indignity.
Around this blazing fire, the other figures are moths made of paper. Madelyn Dundon’s Dale is a cipher, a blank slate whose passivity feels less like a character choice and more like a void. Her stillness is not the contemplative quiet of a soul in turmoil but the simple vacancy of a narrative function.
The supporting players are thinly sketched apparitions, oscillating between a blandness that makes no impression and a stilted theatricality that shatters the fragile reality Cartwright so painstakingly builds. They seem to be performing in a thriller while she is inhabiting a tragedy.
The Unraveling of a Threadbare Lie
A story that begins with the promise of exploring the ambiguous, terrifying territories of grief and madness chooses, in the end, the most pedestrian of destinations. The film moves through its first acts like a sleepwalker, its lethargic pacing mistaking inactivity for suspense.
It is a long, meandering corridor that leads only to a small, plain room. The narrative flirts with the sublime terror of the unknown—the specter of ghosts, the labyrinth of a fracturing mind, the possibility of the house as a malevolent force.
Then, it suffers a complete failure of nerve, retreating from these profound questions and collapsing into the clumsy architecture of a crime procedural. This is not a clever twist; it is a thematic abdication. The climax is a messy burst of action, immediately negated by the film’s greatest misstep.
A detective, a man who has existed only at the story’s periphery, arrives like a deus ex machina of the mundane. He proceeds to perform a verbal autopsy on the plot, delivering a protracted monologue that explains every convoluted detail of the scheme.
This laborious exposition violently imposes order onto chaos, robbing the protagonist of her agency and denying the audience any space for interpretation. The titular “ruse” is revealed to be a scaffolding of such contrivance, so dependent on information withheld from the viewer, that its explanation feels less like a revelation and more like a weary apology.
The Ruse is a slow-burn mystery-thriller directed and written by Stevan Mena, which premiered in U.S. theaters on May 16, 2025.
Full Credits
Director: Stevan Mena
Writers: Stevan Mena
Producers and Executive Producers: John Caglione Jr., Stevan Mena
Cast: Veronica Cartwright, Michael Steger, Drew Moerlein, Kayleigh Anne Ruller, T. C. Carter, Janet Lopez, Madelyn Dundon, Bill Sorice, Heather Drew
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Cory Geryak
The Review
The Ruse
While a masterful, haunting performance from Veronica Cartwright and visuals that capture a stark coastal beauty offer moments of profound artistry, The Ruse collapses under the weight of its own clumsy narrative. A film that flirts with deep questions about memory and madness ultimately chooses simplistic, unsatisfying answers, trading atmospheric dread for a trick that isn't worth the telling.
PROS
- A commanding and deeply affecting central performance from Veronica Cartwright.
- Stunning cinematography that beautifully captures the isolated Maine landscape.
CONS
- A convoluted plot that culminates in a clumsy, unsatisfying explanatory monologue.
- Poor sound design with frequently muffled and unclear dialogue.
- Lethargic pacing and uneven supporting performances.
