Director: Julia Max
Year: 2025
Country: Canada/USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Caring for their sick father, a woman and his wife try to make sure they’re giving him the best chance at getting better which soon starts to take a toll on them both when he passes away and they begin a ritual to bring him back, leading them to a supernatural route they can’t return from.
Review:
This was a troublesome and somewhat difficult genre effort. When this one works is based almost entirely around the final half, where the ritual is performed and the couple heads off into the other realm to continue their quest. The exploits of the specific ritual and how they’re to follow the set of instructions as they do makes for a solid starting point already so that when they realize that part of the process is to go to the other side and retrieve the soul of their father to bring back with them provide not only a great series of visually-impressive tactics and rituals, but also getting off enough storyline motivations for the chilling storyline revelations. The scenes in the other realm, especially involving the naked figures shown suffering the deformed influence of the demonic figures controlling the dimension, create a series of encounters and emotional resolutions that make for a fun enough time here as this one goes along.
There are some problems with this one keeping it down, though. The main aspect of this one tends to revolve around the continued usage and pronounced exploration of generational trauma and grieving between family members, which is inherently clichéd and just bland to sit through. The idea of going through the process of looking into the family history of their dead patriarch and trying to reconcile who he was and what their relationships with him were like carries on from the very beginning with the strained relationships at paly between the two women who are there to help treat him at the time he needs it the most. This makes for a quite bland time here waiting around for this one to try offering up the kind of strained and fractured scenes bringing their emotions to the surface, the longer they stay there to perform the ritual, so everything here becomes a struggle to get invested in their emotionally draining quarrels.
The other problem here is the bizarre series of general, troublesome motivations for how everything is supposed to go down. The initial setup of the family relationship being strained between the two women is enough to help us overlook how the whole turn to the spiritual goes from no build-up into the supernatural. This drops the mothers’ descent into the mystical with this rampant usage of occult practices and trinkets almost immediately, which is supposed to represent how little they know about each other, but comes off with little build-up or suspense. That carries on with why they need to carry out the process of bringing him back to life from the dead realm for no point, and that leaves everything with so little information that there are some problematic features with this one.
Overview: *.5/5
Enjoyable enough at times but still massively flawed, there’s some worthwhile elements to this one that get brought down considerably by the flaws on display throughout here. Give it a shot if these kinds of drama-heavy, trauma-fueled genre efforts are appealing or you’re not bothered by those factors too much, while most others out there should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment