Let Us Make Eve (2023)
★ — Let Us Make Eve (2023)
Belize is not a country that has produced many theatrical releases to speak of. A small Central American nation of fewer than half a million people, it has almost no formal film industry infrastructure, which makes any feature-length production originating from there a genuinely rare thing. Let Us Make Eve (2023) arrives as part of that trickle rather than any kind of wave, a thriller-drama-horror hybrid running at a trim 90 minutes, produced under the 1555 Filmworks and Night Fox Entertainment banners. The premise is one that genre fans will find broadly familiar: a group of women, bound together by a dark secret from their teenage years (a murder they collectively committed), reunite for a getaway, only for that shared guilt to drag them towards a reckoning. It is the sort of setup that has fuelled countless psychological thrillers, and on paper there is nothing wrong with the bones of it.
The film is directed by Mark Harris, and sits within a modest wave of independent genre filmmaking from the early 2020s that has been quietly pushing at the edges of where horror and drama intersect. For a sense of how varied that space can be, it is worth looking at something like Tiger Stripes or the bleak, unnerving atmosphere of When Evil Lurks, both of which show what independent genre filmmaking from outside the Hollywood mainstream can achieve when the material and execution are working in the same direction. Let Us Make Eve leads with a principal cast of Jasmine Burke, Andrea Bordeaux, Indira Andrewin, Dawn Noel and Maryam Abdul, all women carrying the film almost entirely on their own. The production leans into its Belizean setting, and whatever else might be said about it, the country itself provides a genuinely photogenic backdrop, lush and sun-drenched in a way that a film with more confident direction might have used to real atmospheric effect. Whether Harris marshals all of these elements into something coherent is, of course, the question.
A-Z World Movie Tour Belize Seriously. What the actual fuck? No point. No story. Ridiculous dialogue. Terrible acting. I still have no clue what this was even supposed to be about. My Girlfriend and I actually came up with a better story while speculating (incorrectly) wtf was going on. Belize looks nice. Also a woman floated for some reason. Utter fluff
And honestly, when a film loses both of us within the runtime, that is usually a sign that something has gone quite wrong at the screenplay stage, long before anyone called action. There is something particularly frustrating about a premise with real potential, set somewhere as visually interesting as Belize, that cannot seem to decide what kind of film it wants to be. For thriller fans curious about the genre from other corners of the world, your time is probably better spent elsewhere. My honest recommendation would be to put on The Serpent and the Rainbow or, if you want something from the same era with genuine dramatic weight, Sugar Cane Alley. At least Belize looks nice. That much we can all agree on.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-05-28
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: YouTube TV · Philo · ALLBLK Apple TV channel · ALLBLK Amazon channel
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
