Director: Jason M.J. Brown
Year: 2018
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
On vacation in the countryside, a couple learns of family trouble and must return home, but when car trouble stops them at a remote abbey, they try to press on, only to find themselves stuck in a strange, inescapable purgatory while being haunted by a restless spirit that haunts the building.
Review:
Overall, this was a decent enough, if somewhat flawed, genre effort. One of the better factors here is the fine way this starts to introduce the strange location and its effect on them, the longer they stay there. After they arrive in the car accident and try walking along looking for help in the wooded area, but can’t find anything to help them, this begins diving into a rather fun realm of sequences and setpieces, allowing the slowly-dawning realization of where they are and what’s going on when they are unable to find anyone else there and can’t leave. Exploring the abbey’s grounds proves unnerving enough, and it signals the retreat to want to more familiar grounds, which is where they realize they can’t leave, providing the framework for the duo to try getting somewhere else rather than stay here. This type of mindset and approach gives the second half some decent scares as they try to make their way past the ghostly figure following them around the woods, which provides some likable moments.
However, there are still way too many problems here, which mainly stem from the inability to offer up what’s going on at an interesting pace. The film feels incredibly long and drawn-out despite not even topping a full ninety-minute run time, with the main part of the film following the hero wandering through the woods, washing his face by a pool, or filling his bottle at a nearby stream. None of this is all that interesting, as it never develops any sense of time continuum within the location, with the purported involvement said to last for years, yet everything being played in real-time setups tends to cause everything to feel dragged out. Even extra bits like the opening sequences featuring their struggling relationship woes take forever to get going, as if this were a short film stretched out to a feature-length running time, where it’s not all that involved in what’s going on, and when mixed alongside the low-budget limitations that crop up throughout here, hold the film down pretty heavily.
Overview: **/5
An intriguing but ultimately flawed effort overall, this one manages to get some worthwhile moments here, but is just undone by too many flaws to be much better than this end result. Those with an appreciation for this kind of genre fare or who are fine with the issues on display will have the most to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
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