Director: Colin Cairnes, Cameron Cairnes
Cast: David Dastmaclchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi
Have I Seen it Before: No.
Did I Like It: And yet, I worry I might have been ever-so-slightly overhyped on the film before going in. There’s nothing especially new on display in the film. It will not completely change the way you look at horror films. As much as people were talking the film up, I might have been secretly hoping for something at that level. Everything about the possession of Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) has all been done in movies since The Exorcist (1973). The unravelling which inevitably follows after trying to harness the occult for success paints every inch of Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Your mileage with found footage might vary, but at best there’s not a lot of unexplored potential after The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). Filmmakers continue to try to set their stories in the 1970s, because… I don’t know. The decade is scarier than all the others?
What happens here, is that all of those elements are fused together into something that may not be entirely new, but is refreshing. Much more importantly? All of those elements are executed near flawlessly.
Trying to make a period setting believable is an almost guaranteed recipe for failure in a movie. I see the 2020s in a moment. Not here. The filming styles (alternating between film and video) makes everything seem like it is of the era, and that’s coming from the guy who spent large portions of the pandemic watching network newsfeeds from the Watergate era in order to self-soothe.
The possessed little girl feels familiar, but after dozens, if not hundreds of rehashes of the form—including quite recently—this girl feels unnerving from the first moment she appears on screen. She has a stare that Linda Blair would envy.
Adding a twist onto the found footage, the film rather ingeniously harnesses its unreality to introduce the doubt—even now, several days after seeing it—about just what I saw? Was I just as hypnotized as the characters in the film? Probably not, but can I say with 100% certainty I am aware of what happened both to the characters, or myself. If that’s not great horror, I don’t know what is.
If this isn’t the best—or at least most finely crafted—horror film this year, then we are truly in for a great year.