Delayed Reaction: Murder, Death, Koreatown

Premise: After a murder in his neighborhood, a man becomes obsessed with figuring out what really happened.

This movie is rather shrouded in mystery. Given how hard it was for me to even look up aspects of it after the fact, I'll wait before I really go into the details. The basics are that it is a found-footage horror movie, and the "gimmick" is that it begins with an actual Koreatown murder of a man by his wife...At least, I'm 99% sure that it's an actual murder. Maybe the filmmakers did an exceptional job planting seeds across the net.

A big appeal of this movie is how hard it sells itself as real. Almost to a fault. The camerawork is bad. Like, shaky-cam normally doesn't bother me, but this protagonist is so ill-equipped to hold a camera that even I got annoyed. The editing and storytelling are purposely unfocused for verisimilitude. In fact, this movie might work best had they gone really guerilla with it and released it as a series of YouTube videos to fool some people really well.

I don't want to over-hype this movie though. And consider this your warning that I won't be worried about spoiling anything after this point. This movie is a great reminder that some budget can go a long way. Money for things like good actors, perhaps. I don't mean polished actors. I mean convincing ones. Whenever someone was getting interviewed for this, I could feel them looking to the director half the time. I never bought that they were regular people getting annoyed by this crazy guy. I've seen dozens of found-footage movies where directors coaxed believable performances from unpolished actors, so I can't forgive this as a trade-off for authenticity. The filmmaker himself is the worst culprit. I never bought him as a guy descending to madness. He didn't really feel manic. That's a problem. I need to believe that for every second the camera is off, he's still obsessing over this. How about the apartment slowly getting more disheveled? How about the girlfriend doing more than giving unapproving glances occasionally? At one point, he has a single piece of paper with all his evidence. One sheet! That took maybe an hour to make. I need walls covered with theories. Notebooks full of sprawled notes. I know the point is that he's not very good at this detective stuff, but most manic people aren't. That doesn't stop them from being prolific.

There's a kernel of a great idea in this movie. It does a pretty decent amount with the smallest budget you can imagine. I like the concept of, essentially, an amateur podcasting sleuth getting in over his head and it's not clear how much he's manufacturing his own problems. It was just too lo-fi for me to buy into it. If this turns out to be a proof-of-concept movie that the filmmaker is able to do right with more of a budget later, I'd be excited to see that, although I still have my doubts.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend