Director: Arthur G. Night
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Witchcraft
Plot:
Moving into a run-down complex, a down-on-her-luck woman meets the others who live there before being warned away from a special object that tends to hold a vicious spirit of a witch inside, and when it gets inadvertently released forces them to band together to stop it.
Review:
On the whole, this was a generally disappointing and underwhelming genre effort. Among the few bright parts to this one comes from the setup of the witch’s presence in the community and how it affects what's going on in the community. The initial starting point here, involving the group living at the complex welcoming in the new residents who are soon tortured by bizarre, ethereal singing that drives them to a series of unnatural and self-inflicted deaths shortly after finding this cursed object, makes for a decent enough opening here. The lives of the community are handled well enough and make for a strong starting point, so that the sequences of the group living in the complex are quite intriguing and chilling when it starts to hint that there’s a potential possession in their ranks that needs to be handled with an exorcism. With the backstory that ties together the history of the figure haunting them and what is needed to stop it, this all comes together, interestingly enough.
Outside of that, though, there’s little here that is worthwhile. The pacing to everything is completely all over the place, going from this extended intro to their life at the facility where the low-rent conditions and low quality of life are hammered home to such a degree that it’s almost half an hour before the titular melody is even brought up signaling the appearance of the witch being released which makes this section feel like forever before it gets anything accomplished. Moreover, the flashback structure of filling in what’s going on makes for a fun time bringing out the different implications in the storyline, but these are also handled with a slow-going nature, where hardly anything has enough time to breathe as a result. The final few minutes, where the group springs into action to stop the supernatural powers of the witch, are the only time this has anything related to action or spectacle, so the lack of special effects or other elements to keep its low-budget origins hidden is missing, leading to its main drawbacks.
Overview: **/5
An intriguing if obviously limited genre effort, this one manages to be somewhat watchable for what it is while having quite a few issues present that manage to hold this back in the end. Those with an appreciation for this kind of genre fare or who are curious about this one will have a lot to like here, while most others out there might want to heed caution.
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