Why I Saw It: Number one question I need answered in a fount footage movie: Why are the cameras on? In this case, it's a documentary crew who is filming a piece on the effects of alzheimers. They even include a nod at the beginning to this being cut from that footage, not the entirety of the footage. A little goes a long way with me in this horror sub-genre.
The movie relies on all the found footage tricks you're used to. Bad angles, stationary cameras at night, timecodes that don't make sense. While there's nothing I haven't seen before, it was all handled well. The rate of the escalation of the story is measured and calculated. Thankfully, I didn't recognize enough of the actors to take me out of the illusion too often.
Why I Wish I Hadn't: For good scares, few if any horror movies benefit from being over 10-20 minutes long. The more things get explained, the less scary they are. Deborah Logan definitely suffers from that. And this story gets so damn big. By the time she has kidnapped the little girl from the hospital, I wasn't very engaged. So, the big moment, <spoiler alert> when she's trying to devour the little girl's head, didn't land as much as I think it was meant to.
Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend
I agree with yr rating for different reasons. I though this was just an OK film. It had a really interesting premise. I think it could have been done better, though. But, it committed the same mistake so many horror films do these days: They start out naturalistic and unsettling, but veer towards the supernatural for (I think) shock value towards the end. There is some value in sustained uncertainty, and while I see why the film-makers do what they do (and I do think this was well-made cinema) I wish they'd stick with the ambiguity, because it's fundamentally more terrifying.
ReplyDeleteThere's a wonderful short story by Laird Barron called "Blackwood's Baby" and (arguably) it succeeds mainly because nothing explicitly supernatural happens in the whole story. But something deeply unnatural happens and it's much more unsettling for it.
You know, I have a similar criticism with so many horror movies that try to explain what's been happening late in the movie. Uncertainty is the source of horror, people. When you try to build some coherent parallel world, rather than suggesting it, the tension falls apart, in my opinion. I think it was kind of reaching towards the end. Wasn't the girl-eating scene in a cave? So we've got body horror and enclosed spaces. Lazy horror. They set up a great premise and squandered it. That's my problem with so many horror films and franchises.
I mean, mining Alzheimer's disorder for horror? Who's done that before? It's legitimately horrifying. Take disintegration of self and add on a possession narrative? You just don't need the snake-mouth scene id you're a confident writer.
That said, this was one of the better possession movies I've seen.