MOVIE REVIEW – Trust Flirts With the Idea of Becoming an Uncomfortably Timely Survival Thriller That Tackles Modern Anxieties, but Ultimately Collapses Under the Weight of Its Own Half-Formed Ideas. Not Even Sophie Turner’s Presence Can Save a Film Where the Script and the Direction Are Clearly Pulling in Opposite Directions.

Some screenplays give themselves away within minutes, quietly signaling that they could have benefited from a few more ruthless rewrites, and Trust fits that description all too well. Directed by Carlson Young – who previously showed a solid sense of pacing with the romantic comedy Upgraded – the film is built on material that could have supported a tense, contemporary survival horror. In execution, however, it repeatedly misses the mark. Recent years have been filled with thrillers and horror-thrillers that drop vulnerable female protagonists into extreme situations – films like Don’t Move, Strange Darling, Companion, or Push. Compared to those, Trust fails to capitalize on the promise of its setup and slowly turns into an exercise in squandered potential.

Fame, Scandal, and a Catastrophically Bad Decision

At the center of the story is Lauren Lane, a well-known actress played by Sophie Turner. After humiliating details of her private life leak online, Lauren retreats to a remote Airbnb in an attempt to escape the noise. That search for peace and isolation quickly takes a dark turn, and it soon becomes clear that Lauren is not only fighting for her own survival, but for someone else’s as well. This is where the narrative already begins to wobble. The plot lurches from one direction to another, as if writer Gigi Levangie pinned a handful of ideas to a board and selected between them without ever fully committing. The result is a scattered storyline and character dynamics that are difficult to read or take seriously.

The present-day thread opens with Lauren’s team scrambling to contain the scandal and salvage her public image. Although the film insists that Lauren is the star of a massively popular, ongoing TV series, the fictional show feels less like a cultural phenomenon and more like a short-lived, two-season Disney Channel production. Even stranger is the way the script expects us to accept that a celebrity of this stature – who is also pregnant – would find it perfectly reasonable to disappear alone, without any form of security. Within the film’s internal logic, this decision predictably proves to be the worst possible one.

Motherhood as a Survival Engine

Trust briefly hints at a more interesting direction when Lauren’s pregnancy moves into focus, but this potential is never fully explored. Instead of offering a genuine inner conflict or a nuanced conversation about the weight of that choice, Lauren clings to the unborn child without hesitation, and every struggle she faces stems from this single motivation. A quieter, more balanced exchange that acknowledged the other side of that decision could have added real depth, but the film opts for the safest and most convenient route. Lauren’s entire survival arc becomes almost entirely defined by her pregnancy, and because the script doesn’t know how to develop this idea, tension curdles into frustration rather than suspense.

When the break-in finally occurs, Lauren chooses the absolute worst possible hiding spot. The home invasion itself relies on painfully contrived logic: the situation is enabled by one of the intruders’ nephews, who works for the Airbnb operator and has access to the house’s camera system. Two spectacularly foolish criminals carry out the initial break-in, and when the nephew arrives to stop them, the situation spirals completely out of control. Accidental and deliberate deaths pile up, pushing the story into increasingly chaotic territory.

On paper, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Trust bending the rules of the classic home-invasion thriller by trapping Lauren in a single location. The real missed opportunity lies in the fact that she’s never given meaningful agency. The film toys with the idea of turning her into an active participant who confronts her attackers head-on, but that possibility remains largely unexplored.

Stupidity, Hollow Characters, and Collapsing Dynamics

Whenever the film shifts its focus away from Lauren, viewers are left to endure a supporting cast that is, almost without exception, written as astonishingly stupid. If Trust were a knowingly exaggerated trash slasher, this might have worked as part of the appeal. Instead, it presents itself as a serious survival thriller, which makes these moments feel exhausting rather than entertaining. The story offers very few genuinely engaging twists, leaving the audience confused far more often than tense.

Flashbacks appear sporadically, yet they fail to provide any real sense of time or clarity regarding the characters’ ages. The film never clearly establishes the age gap between Lauren and Peter, rendering any interpretation of their past and present relationship dynamics shallow at best. Rather than building on these layers, Trust jumps erratically between characters before returning to Lauren, who delivers monologues to her unborn child in an indistinct space while continuing to make one bad decision after another.

Sophie Turner does everything she can with the material she’s given, but beyond a certain point the dialogue itself becomes grating. The behavior of the supporting cast feels wildly inconsistent, as if each character wandered in from a completely different movie.

Blood, Colors, and Missed Opportunities

Trust’s strengths are almost entirely visual. The bloodier moments land as intended, and the shifting color palette adds a welcome layer of atmosphere. Beyond that, however, there is little that truly deserves praise. The film attempts to juggle too many themes and ideas at once, yet never handles any of them with enough confidence.

By the time Lauren is finally given a chance to develop into something more compelling, it hardly matters anymore. The audience has very little reason to remain invested in her beyond the fact that she was previously exploited by a pathetic man. Almost nothing feels fully thought through, and that lack of care ultimately undermines the entire experience.

All things considered, Trust is a film best suited for viewers who actively want to support female creators both in front of and behind the camera. Even then, there are far stronger thrillers out there that don’t manage to irritate their audience at a fundamental level. If Sophie Turner in a thriller role is reason enough to press play, the experience may not be a total loss – but it is difficult to recommend it for much else.

-Herpai Gergely “BadSector”-