Director: Kristopher Polaha
Year: 2026
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Psychological
Plot:
Struggling to get his career going, a down-on-his-luck impressionist learns that a talent agency wants to represent him on the condition that he use a creepy doll in his ventriloquist act, and as he starts to gain notoriety for his work, he starts to suspect something is wrong with the doll.
Review:
This was a disappointing and highly underwhelming genre effort. At its heart, the film takes on the theme of fame and celebrity and the lengths to which a person will go to achieve it, leading to a devout change of character once that happens. With this one being so reliant on the idea of being a character-based psychological study of how much he wants to get his career off the ground, going to lame clubs full of unreceptive audiences, or co-workers unwilling to put up with his training techniques, making everything supposedly feel more rewarding when the change occurs later, once after taking over his career. With the later scenes bringing about the different behavior changes that arise once he starts the new show with the puppet, turning on friends and others around him, and slowly starting to show the effects of the abusive doll being attached to him, this makes for a strong take on the subject.
Outside of that, this one comes about without much else going on. The whole thing is reliant on the idea of wanting to see him succeed at the profession, but it’s just not that interesting a performance to follow up on. The impressions are bargain-basement celebrities and styles that are immensely common and not that special of a performance once he starts telling obvious and unfunny setpieces. That’s the whole point, granted, but it carries over into the part where he’s supposed to be successful with the dummy, and it’s the same tired humiliation jokes commonly found in this setup, where everything is supposed to be larger and funnier, yet hardly any of it lands as being funny. It takes a lot of the sting out of the whole thing and leaves everything with the kind of approach that can make for a dull, sluggish experience at times.
Overview: */5
An intriguing character study but bland genre effort, there’s little here for most outright genre fans to like, as the types of ideas here work for what it is, even though the majority of those drawbacks here are more damaging to a specific mindset. More adventurous cinephiles will want to give this a shot, while ardent horror fans might be more disappointed with this one.
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