By the time the needle goes in, you already know the rules. Don’t Move isn’t coy about its intentions: a grieving woman heads deep into the woods for quiet; a stranger arrives with a paralytic and a smile; the clock starts. “It takes place in real time,” Kelsey Asbille told me. “Like when 20 minutes actually means 20 minutes.” There’s a nasty elegance to that, the way a simple math problem becomes a panic attack. Asbille, who’s spent years wringing dignity from Yellowstone’s chaos, now has to sell fear with half her instrument turned off. “We had color-coded scripts for the different stages she was in,” she said. “The camera mirrors Iris’s limited movement, so you’re kind of trapped where she is.”
The film looks Northern California—there’s literally a Big Sur sign—but the forest is Bulgarian: protected, hushed, and very good at pretending it’s miles from any other human. “We shot in Bulgaria,” Asbille said, laughing at my surprise. “Very far from Big Sur.” The isolation wasn’t a vibe—it was a tool. “Because it’s such a contained thriller,” she said, “being in our little bubble helped. We were sequestered, chasing each other.” There’s an intimacy to that word—sequestered—that suits a two-hander where the third lead is time.
Finn Wittrock—soft-spoken, surgical, those eyes that go cold like a light switch—plays the man with the needle. He’s done menace before, but here he calibrates it like a locksmith. “I thought of him as a chameleon,” he said. “He tries to become someone different with every new person he meets, puts on a different mask to get what he wants.” It isn’t cartoon evil. He even believes he’s offering a gift, in his own deranged Boy Scout way. “He thinks he’s giving people the most fascinating experience of their lives,” Wittrock said. “When the moment most humans would call the saddest was actually the moment they felt the most alive.” It’s repulsive and almost understandable, which is exactly the kind of line a good villain walks.
Before anyone gets hunted, though, the film fakes you into a meet-cute. “It could be a romcom for the first fifteen minutes,” Asbille joked. Wittrock swore the investment is real. “In that first scene, he’s really there with her,” he said. “It’s not subversive. Then the next moment he’s… somewhere else.” That pivot required rehearsal, not just for the tonal snap but because this thing is physically gnarly. “There’s a lot of choreography,” Wittrock said. “Fights and physical stuff.” Asbille added, “We didn’t shy away from rehearsal. It was really beneficial.” Real time is merciless; you don’t hide behind the edit. You build a rhythm and hang on.
Asbille’s particular nightmare is acting without a body. Paralysis onscreen is usually a game of stillness; she makes it a game of micro-choices. “There was a childlike play in figuring out what that paralysis looked like,” she said. “The directors introduced me to an anesthesiologist to walk through what a similar real-life drug would feel like. We started there, then on the day figured out what actually translates.” It’s a simple sentence that hides a pile of math: calibrate what part twitches, when breath shallows, how much blink you lose, how much panic you can show before it reads as arm movement. “You’re so limited physically,” she said, “and you still have to convey this internal, emotional experience.”
The woods don’t make it easy. Bulgaria’s forests also come with rivers, lakes, and inconvenient gravity. “All the water sequences were rough,” Asbille said, then grinned. “Especially when you’re zip-tied.” She’s also afraid of heights. “Right from the beginning,” she said, rolling her eyes at her past self who presumably said yes before reading the scene headings. “You sign up to be an actor to have fun and play—and then you’re in an environmental movie: ‘Get in this water. Climb that.’” She shrugged. “Honestly, that’s what I love about it. Every project gives you some unique experience. I’ve gone swimming in a lake in Bulgaria—never before or since.”
Wittrock does the quieter torture, the mind that smiles while the hand tightens a knot. He has the gift of the close-up: those dead-calm pupils that could sell you a used car or end you in a clearing. I joked about Evil Eyes 101. “I took that class at Juilliard,” he joked. “It comes natural.” Asbille watched the transformations from sometimes literal immobility. “He’s playing all these different characters based on who he’s meeting,” she said. “I got to sit back and watch great performances…and tell a lot of story without any help from the rest of my body.”
If the movie feels oddly…gleeful…about hurting its characters, blame Sam Raimi—in the nicest possible way. He produced, and showed up in Bulgaria to sprinkle fairy dust and hard advice. “He was there at the beginning,” Asbille said, a little starstruck. “He has this childlike wonder. You’re like, you made Evil Dead and you’re the sweetest guy ever.” Wittrock added, “He had a lot of technical advice for our DP and makeup. He was in every department in a good way—the voice of wisdom.” Also: the man knows how to shoot a forest. “Yes he does,” Wittrock echoed, a tiny reverent chorus.
For a set so drenched in anxiety, they kept it unserious between takes. “We tried to keep it pretty light,” Wittrock said. “It gets into dark psychological territory, but we weren’t precious about it. Playful and dorky when we weren’t in the thick of it.” There is, apparently, a blooper reel worth a drink or three. “There are some good ones,” Asbille said, biting her lip. “I’ll tell you later.” She will not.
The two-hander thing can be romantic or suffocating depending on chemistry. “It’s a really good thing we liked each other,” Asbille said. “It was my first time really doing a two-hander,” Wittrock added. “In a movie, anyway.” With fewer bodies comes more air for nuance. Predator/prey mutates into something messy—recognition, almost. “It becomes more than cat-and-mouse,” Asbille said. “There’s a sort of recognition of each other as the movie goes on.” She didn’t mean empathy; she meant acknowledgment, the horror-movie version of “I see you.” Real time demands that, too. You can’t skip steps when the clock is your third character.
Outside the trees, life intruded the way it always does. Asbille had just closed a long Yellowstone chapter. “Years coming to an end,” she said, still sounding a little disoriented. “I don’t know if it’s a role I’m looking for so much as the people I want to work with. That’s what I look forward to next.” Wittrock—who the industry loves to cast as a beautiful problem—got to be funny in something called So Much for Love. “I don’t kill one person,” he said, mock-thrilled. “It was very fun. I got to be funny.” There’s relief in that sentence, like shaking adrenaline out of your wrists.
But Don’t Move is their shared bruise. It’s a small cast with a wide scope, cut to the bone by the real-time trick and fattened by Bulgaria’s indifferent wild. The first fifteen minutes flirt with a different genre, then the movie snaps its fingers and you’re here, counting. It’s the rare thriller that trusts timing more than twist. And it knows what to do with two faces—one frozen, one fluid—staring each other down while the minutes go thin.
By the end I admitted my heart rate was unprofessional. “You either took years off my life for the anxiety,” I told them, “or you gave me years with the adrenaline.” Asbille grinned. “So you’re exactly your age.” Wittrock didn’t miss. “Thanks for nothing,” he said. It’s the kind of line you hear right before someone goes for a swim.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
