Let’s get this out of the way up top: Don’t Move, the new horror movie on Netflix, should have been called Can’t Move. It’s not a movie about a protagonist who should not move! It’s a movie about a protagonist who physically cannot move! In fact, it’s highly encouraged that she does move, as much as she possibly can, before the paralyzing drug fully takes over her body.
Anyhow. Directed by Adam Schindler and Brian Netto, with a screenplay by T.J. Cimfel and David White, Don’t Move was produced by Sam Raimi and Zainab Azizi via their production company, Raimi Productions. The film stars Kelsey Asbille—best known for her role as Monica Dutton on the Paramount series Yellowstone—as a woman named Iris who is injected with a paralyzing by a serial killer (played by Finn Wittrock). She only has the time before the drug kicks in and shuts down her muscles to escape.
Apparently, the misleading title didn’t bother Netflix viewers, because Don’t Move shot to the top of Netflix’s Top 10 Movies trending titles list, where it currently sits at the No. 1 slot. And some of those many viewers are wondering: Is Don’t Move based on a true story?
No. Don’t Move is not based on a true story, nor was it inspired by anything that happened in real life. It is completely fictional, which means it was made-up. It’s called a movie, people. Not real!
That said, co-directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto did consult an expert in an attempt to make Iris’s paralysis as realistic as possible.
“We have a good friend who’s married to an anesthesiologist,” Netto said in a recent interview with Screen Rant. “One of the first things we did was set up a call where we went with her through the script. She was like, ‘Okay, you don’t mention what this is, but this is how it would work.’ And then we brought Kelsey [Asbille] into the conversation to talk about what that would look like, what the mobility would look like, how it would start to break down, and what the muscles are feeling in that moment.”
The idea for a script centered around someone who can’t move was an idea born out of the pandemic, according to writers TJ Cimfel and David White. In an interview with Reel Chicago, the writers said that the directors pitched them the movie, “in 2020 during the teeth of the pandemic when they called us and pitched the idea of a movie centered around someone slowly losing their ability to move. There was something so intriguing about the paralysis that we all were experiencing at the time.”
So there you have it. Don’t Move was inspired by feeling trapped during the pandemic, and it is not based on a true story. Not even a little bit.