Gut buster coil8/16/2023 We humans must come with a genetic marker clearly labeled “fear of the unknown.” How else to explain why your breathing stops, stomach clenches and you suddenly develop bat ears in the face of the mundane - a light goes off, a door closes. There is lots of scary stuff in between and, in this case, very little comic relief beyond the psychic/ghost-buster who makes house calls.įeatherston and Sloat do a good job as the couple in the middle of the mess, as they swing between bickering about the thing and being frightened by it. There’s not much to the story: Evil has its eye on Katie, the couple tries to escape or outwit it, and we know historically how that tends to go. Though the footage looks real enough, you can also sense a bona-fide filmmaker’s hand in the proceedings. That footage, along with the free-style video that Micah shoots himself, is our primary point of view on this story, which works to add a certain veracity in a YouTube/Facebook way. Night after night, the time-lapse camera keeps its unblinking eye on their bedroom, where most of the action takes place. We’re dropped into Katie and Micah’s lives just as Micah is setting up a DIY surveillance system so that he can record any suspicious activity in the house.Īs he begins shooting footage and talking to Katie, we realize that he’s merely going to elaborate lengths to prove that she is just imagining things. The film is set in the comfortable affluence of a San Diego suburb, where bad things aren’t supposed to happen. Though the story does not have either the sophistication or the complexity of the master, the first-time director understands that it’s what you don’t see, and the way in which you don’t see it, that counts. That the film was shot over just a few days in the director’s house, with no money, no stars and no studio involved until much, much later, is a testament to Peli’s natural instincts. The man to curse for all this darkness is Israeli-born writer-director Oren Peli, a video-game designer turned filmmaker who has created a psychological thriller of such small scale and yet such heightened effect that no doubt Hitchcock, wherever he may be, is smiling. Before the lights go back up - and at some point you may wonder whether they ever will - there will be a very tight coil of anxiety buried deep in your gut that is very hard to get rid of.
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