There’s a fine line between ambiguous and underwritten, and in a valiant attempt to hit the former, undertone errs a bit on the side of the latter. When it comes to story/character/thematic depth, there’s just nothing there. But when it comes to scares, this flick is unstoppable. I was heavily spooked from moment one until the batshit final 15 mins or so. Writer/director Ian Tuason’s exceptional freakout hellbus filmmaking hearkens back to the early days of the internet when me and my buddies would seek out creepy audio and video at 2AM in my parents’ basement, and we’d convince ourselves we came across something supernatural if only to validate having spent a full hour downloading a ten second clip.
Evy (Nina Kiri) is taking care of her ailing, comatose mother. It’s a lonely existence, broken up by her duties as a podcast host. She and her offscreen cohost Justin (Adam DiMarco) scour the internet for spooky material and give it their own spin for a presumably large audience. Justin is the believer while Evy is the skeptic. For their latest episode the duo is investigating a series of ten audio clips submitted to the show by an anonymous listener. These clips are creepy on the surface, but soon Evy finds that the spooks go beyond her ears and imagination. Strange occurrences start happening around her mother’s empty home, calling into question Evy’s natural skepticism.
The bad news is that that’s pretty much it. This is a film that fights tooth and nail to reach feature length based on what probably should have been a mid-length short. There’s passing mention of additional details that are never capitalized upon, namely Evy’s history with the church and struggles with alcoholism. This reads as a filmmaker trying to create negative space into which the viewer can spook themselves with conjecture long after the film has ended. Unfortunately it doesn’t play out that way and instead gives the script an unfinished feel. But even though a lot of material is left on the table, I can appreciate the attempt at ambiguity for what it is. And since it’s bolstered by a steadily escalating feeling of dread, culminating in a final reel that is white-knuckle levels of terrifying, it’s ultimately a small complaint.
Tuason uses negative visual space as well. Many scenes begin with a wonderfully off-kilter Dutch angle that refuses to settle into symmetry. When the camera’s axis lies flat, the filmmaker likes to keep his subjects on the edge of the frame, letting the setting’s unique architecture dominate the viewer’s eye. This cues the viewer to always be looking for entities and spookiness all over the frame, much the way our protagonists scour an audio file for something out of the ordinary. More often than not there’s nothing there, but when there is, well, I just got chills thinking about it.
The film’s visual framing allows for Kiri to shine in a potentially starmaking performance. As one of just two actors seen on screen (the other speeding the entirety of the film in a coma), the emotional beats all come through Kiri’s low-key, nuanced performance. Since there’s not much to go off of in terms of story, the emotional beats are all generated through Kiri’s performance. Her face fills in the script’s many blank spots, making Evy a character to root for even though there’s so little of her on the page. We see her struggles, her fears, and the slow peeling away of her skepticism as the generally sleepy movie wakes up around her, filling the empty frame with fresh horrors.
This is one to see on the big screen not just for the weaponized usage of empty visual real estate but also for the sound. I was lucky to attend a screening in a Dolby theater, where the tremendously in-depth mix was given free rein to dig into my soul via my earholes. It’s the best use of sound in horror since Annihilation. I frequently wanted to look over my shoulder and see what was behind me (it was just another dude who was watching the movie).
Directed by Ian Tuason
Written by Ian Tuason
Starring Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michéle Duquet, Keana Lyn Bastidas
Rated R, 93 minutes
