Director: Curry Barker
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
Plot:
Attempting a big social media prank, a group of friends tries to continually get one over on each other as the experience draws them into the long-hidden psychopathic intuitions of one of the group’s depressed past that sets them off into a race against time to stop their unhinged plans from coming true.
Review:
Overall, this was a solid enough indie genre effort. One of the finer aspects of this one is the engrossing and likable setup that features quite a lot of likable elements to it. The initial setup with the friend group who are going around setting up the exploits of their channel and relationship with each other by setting up elaborate and harmful pranks on each other for a birthday surprise gets this established quite nicely so that the later exploits are far more believable. Not knowing whether or not the series of crazed incidents, from encountering the stranger in the apartment to the suicide attempts by the figure they come across, and the bizarre kidnapping scheme that quickly goes array, there’s a genuinely thrilling and immersive experience that all builds up a fantastic showcase for the eventual devolution into insanity that comes about as how he treats his friends over time helps this out immensely.
Beyond this, though, there’s not much to this one that stands out. The type of setup featured here generating vicious and somewhat illegal pranks on people for the sake of views on their video channel makes the group so unlikable it’s hard to get invested in what’s going on with the friends barely being worth investing this much time into. As this is due to the prank-video nature of the channel no one can be believed or trusted, which just adds even more to what’s going on here There’s also the fact that there are so many obvious instances in which psychotic behavior becomes quite underwhelming to see play out as too many obvious red flags are ignored for the sake of moving a story along that’s quite cliche and familiar. As well as a lackluster finale that makes for so many rule-breaking moments of found footage throughout here, these all manage to bring this one down overall.
Overview: **/5
An intriguing if overall problematic found-footage effort, there are some issues to be had with this one although this one does have some worthwhile elements present to keep it going. This will mainly be of interest to found-footage fanatics, those curious about its reputation, or fans of the creative crew while most others out there should heed caution with it.
Comments
Post a Comment