Director: Juan Pablo Arias Munoz
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Stuck in the middle, siblings trying to navigate how to deal with their quarreling parents find solace with a special necklace being used as a bartering tool to get on their good side, but after a series of horrific visions learn the truth about what the necklace means and must try to stop it.
Review:
Overall, this was a fairly fun if problematic genre effort. Among the better aspects of this one is the impressive mystery that takes place here as everything offers a fun build-up to everything. The central setup of the necklace being given as a present through negligent means as he fails to understand the point of the case and then fails to understand why the family members are being subjected to supposed visions of ghosts that are from somewhere he can’t understand offers a fine starting point for this one. The concurrency investigation into what’s going on with everything they keep experiencing and learning more about the actual events that happened throughout the case makes everything far more intriguing than anything as more clues are unraveled and revealed.
That goes along with the series of intriguing encounters with the haunted beings at the center of everything. The initial encounters with the children appearing around the house interacting with the ghost child to the point they claim it’s an imaginary friend following them around that starts to send off alarms about something not being right. The continued hauntings and encounters here offer up the kind of traditional haunted house format where it’s’ emphasis on quick-shot appearances of the grotesque and deformed ghosts appearing out of nowhere to scare them with the misunderstandings arising out of not knowing what’s going on leading into the fantastic finale with not just a seance trying to figure everything out but a more involved series of encounters with the ghost to solve the haunting in fine form.
There are some big factors with this one that bring it down. One of the biggest drawbacks here is the squabbling family dynamics that are in place here that put so many of the encounters into question. The main gist of the strained relationship drawing attention away from the kids and into the father being away and trying to get into their good graces again with the necklace only to find the questionable nature of how he got it in the first place to put the two at odds with each other once again to ignore the daughters’ visions and claims of hauntings. It’s not all that interesting to go through this kind of cliched setup to get the parents away from the encounters the kids are having which would’ve been easy to figure out and stop had they been around.
That highlights the other issue with this one in the longer than necessary running time that drags the pace down considerably. Not only are the scenes of the parents fighting dull and overdone but the other scenes involving the family struggling to remain together or pleading with each other to figure out what’s going on with each other that it all comes off with so little sense of energy that it’s sluggish presentation does bring about an overlong running time. Other factors, like several flashbacks to the original family trying to solve the case about what’s going on with them to solve what’s going on with the current family end up allowing the slow-going pace to run itself out at a longer time than it needed. These do manage to bring this down overall.
Overview: ***.5/5
Far better than expected while still being somewhat problematic, there’s a lot to like with this one which helps to hold it up over the issues that crop up which hold it down. Those with an interest in this style or approach will have the most to like here while most others out there turned off by its drawbacks should heed caution here.
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