Director: Nicholas Pesce
Year: 2020
Country: USA/Canada
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Ghosts
Plot:
Following a series of strange incidents, a detective and her partner are tasked with looking into the deaths of several victims who lived in a specific house, and as they begin investigating they uncover a dark and grisly secret about a curse that continues killing anyone that crosses it as the true culprit.
Review:
Overall, there isn’t much to like with this one. Among the few main positives featured is the appropriately creepy atmosphere that usually comes from the genre. The use of jump-scares throughout here, and especially in the first half, come off nicely, focusing on the time-honored tradition of cutting exactly to show the ghost grabbing a person’s limbs or standing unaware behind the victim. As well, there’s the recreation of one of the genre’s signature scares which is thankfully given a change-over by switching the gender of the afflicted, making for a fine jump-scare. These are enhanced by the generally creepy scenarios present, from the discovery of the skeletons inside the house while looking into the incidents or sudden flash-shocks of the different spirits standing next to people. With some grisly make-up work on the ghosts and some bloody deaths on display, that’s about all that works for this one.
However, that being said, the film has a few major problems. The greatest flaw is the completely convoluted and discordant storyline that never knows what kind of focus it wants to keep. The majority of the film is spent on investigating the strange deaths around her as a means of overlooking her personal struggles and discovering the fate of the couple who lived in the house previously, ending up causing a great deal of confusion by jumping back-and-forth in time to their encounters with the ghost as well as the present-day officers. To then tie in a third time-period to help explain the character motivation behind the crazy old-woman ends up adding to the confusing narrative. This inability to stay focused on a singular incident is incredibly maddening and highlights a weak central story about the cursed house where it could’ve streamlined everything into a tighter structure.
The other main problem with the film is the complete boredom that arises from this one. This spends so little time attempting to be scary that it sometimes fails to even register as a genre picture with all the time it spends getting to focus on the families in the various timelines. The ghosts are rendered such little screentime here in favor of these extended scenes of everyone living unaware of what’s about to happen to them or looking at video evidence files of the past that it completely fails to generate any kind of suspense or tension. Nothing about any of the characters makes them likable, and since we spend so much time with them instead of showcasing the ghostly attacks the film falls flat and dull at every opportunity. Had this been more structurally coherent this might’ve helped slightly but that doesn’t overcome any of the other flaws on display.
Overview: 0.5/5
Filled with logic problems, storyline confusion and a general lack of scares for long stretches of the running time, this offers up very little redeeming or watchable elements outside of a few choice segments scattered throughout here. Only the most die-hard franchise aficionados will find anything of value with this one, while general genre fans have little need to see this one.
This review was originally published on Asian Movie Pulse and is gratefully reprinted with their cooperation.
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