Director: John Oak Dalton
Year: 2020
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Psychological
Plot:
After a woman escapes from a maniac, a man and his wife befriend her and try to help her piece her past together, but the more they come to know about her past being trapped in a crawlspace by a maniacal killer the more they connect her experiences with a string of child-abduction cases in the area and the truth behind it all.
Review:
Overall, this here wasn’t all that bad of an effort. Among the more enjoyable aspects here is the fact that the setup here involving the surviving girls’ psychologically-deteriorating mental state as a result of the escape. Realistically showing the form of trauma and abuse that would normally affect someone in her condition, she’s quiet, shy and reserved about the experience where she doesn’t quite understand social norms or how to blend into everyday conversations in a casual sense. With the little flashes we get involving the Western character from the films she used to watch appearing to her in order to draw the experiences of the past back out into her psyche, this aspect of the film scores rather nicely and has a lot to like.
The other enjoyable element here is the final resolution of everything and how the events tie themselves together. With all the different plot-points and little clues to what’s going on that gets dropped about her past through the stories she tells her, the revelations brought up about her during the role-playing game and finally the screenwriting sessions that actually bring about the real revelation of the truth behind all the various plotlines going on. The ensuing race to free the kidnapped victim lost to everyone else in the heat of the moment gives this a nice bit of urgency and action alongside the darker psychological torment that arises here in the finale, giving this one enough to like to hold it up over it’s few minor flaws.
This one does have a few problems. The fact that there’s plenty of useless and time-wasting filler here drags the pacing of this one down considerably, featuring all sorts of scenes here from the endless round of catch-up once the sheriff arrives to welcome them back to the meet-up with the friends playing the fantasy-game in the store. These scenes serve a fine sense of plot setup yet come off rather clumsily and obviously there to stretch out the padding in the film in order to beef up the running time that barely stretches over an hour as it is. This is the sort of effort that really needed more of an introduction into the killers’ work and what happened to the missing kids that’s going on in the story rather than what’s going on here with the other sources at play in the storyline.
The other problem here is the seemingly random and chaotic storyline that jumps around to various points and plotlines that jump in at random points for no reason. The general setup here, featuring the slowly unveiling reveals about her troubled history with the individuals in town to the talks with the agent and his wife’s involvement in psychoanalyzing the residents and then introducing their martial issue on top of it out of nowhere, there’s so much going on here that it’s incredibly scattershot and discordant. That’s especially troubling with the way this one never makes it clear what’s going on, tending to feature random jump-cuts or points of view that could be a dream or a fantasy or something and it’s not very clear at all. These here are the film’s most troubling efforts.
Overview: **/5
While it does have some enjoyable efforts that are highly watchable and worthwhile, the fact that the flaws here might be somewhat more prominent and impactful will probably lower this one more than anything else featured here. Give this a shot if you’re interested in the psychological aspect of the genre or curious about this type of indie effort, while viewers who are turned off by the flaws or aren’t interested in the style might be turned off here.
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