Parents' Guide to Dancing with a Murderer

This is such a laughably awful drama that it's almost a comedy. It's hard to pinpoint whether this is owing to a script that seems to have been written by someone with no actual experience of the way human beings speak or act, or incompetent directors who seemingly offered no professional guidance to the bland cast. Most outstanding in the movie's failings is the slow, illogical thinking of every character. What guy would ask a woman to have dinner with him the night her mother has gone to the hospital to recover from near-lethal poisoning? A weird man walks up to a woman at a ball and asks if this is her first masked ball. She reasonably asks, "How did you know?" We wonder the same thing—how would he know?

Police seem really bad at their jobs, failing to follow leads, including handwriting samples and the source of text messages. Two actors who can't dance at all hilariously compliment each other on their dancing. The three men featured here—the dead woman's dad, Nora's ex, and Dom, the guy pursuing her now—are all written and acted for maximum creepiness. And Nora is just as bad. With threats hanging over her, it's clear Nora should not attend the next gala, but she thinks aloud, "Maybe going would give me the closure I've been looking for." Closure for what?