Director: Emir Skalonja
Year: 2016
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Haunted by overwhelmingly dark thoughts, a teen trying to make sense of life finds that the visions are leading her to recover memories of her real father, a cult leader looking to use her to raise a god-like being from their religion and must try to prevent that from happening.
Review:
Frankly, this one turned out far better than expected. Among the bright spots on display is the fine build-up done to try getting across the idea of her fracturing mindset. Given that there’s a fine grasp on her lifestyle with her parents being concerned about her and her friend to the typical angsty, too-cool-for-anything attitude in teenagers when they hang out together, this provides a fine grounding of her existing state so that the freaky visions of everything involving the cult have that much more of an impact on her lifestyle. Following the first vision out with her friend involving the black-eyed leader coming to her, the resulting change and difference that affects them is quite fun and chilling to see play out.
As well, this change becomes even more pronounced after that encounter when the visions bring everything to life later on. The main visions of the cult gathered around the bloody and mangled body while the leader continues to taunt and torment her are incredibly chilling and have a lot to like about them as they lead into the alternate dimension. Generating the actual reasoning for the appearances and having plenty of fun with the series of mind-games on her, this is a fine highlight with plenty of creepy visuals and a clever method of dealing with him which is quite intelligent. Coming with some decent indie gore and bloodshed, these here are the film’s more enjoyable aspects.
There are a few missteps featured here. One of the bigger flaws is a series of disjointed storyline setups that are required for this one to function normally. The fact that she’s seemingly aware of who the cult figure was despite only having one vision of him and no other interaction with him is an incredibly bizarre shortcut, much like the shockingly disorienting scene where she runs out on her family. This is an unrealistic and illogical leap of judgement and comes out nowhere, especially with so little evidence to the contrary that would spawn such statements. There’s also the obvious low-budget look and feel that runs rampant which might turn some folks off, especially the production values of an indie effort like this where it’s not something easily hidden but plainly obvious. These here are what hold this one back.
Overview: **.5/5
A far more interesting and enjoyable psychological effort than expected with some solid work throughout here, this one stays quite interesting as the few flaws do come up to lower it somewhat. This is highly worthwhile for fans of indie genre efforts or low-budget psychological genre works while those that aren't interested in any of these factors should heed caution.
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