★ 5 / 10
You know, I almost hate to start off
jesse o
You know, I almost hate to start off with something that I seem to say quite a bit, particularly as it relates to horror flicks, but I've always found myself…
You know, I almost hate to start off with something that I seem to say quite a bit, particularly as it relates to horror flicks, but I've always found myself to be a fan of films that, at the very least, try something different. And sometimes you don't even have to try to be different, but I appreciate seeing hard work and effort into making the best with what you have. And I'm sure there's horror movies, that I've disliked, that had people behind the scenes working hard (like Delirium, which I thought was awful). But if your shitty narrative and genre-hopping kill every possible chance you had of making a good movie, then hard work just isn't gonna be enough. But I digress. This movie, on its surface, just seems like your typical Gothic ghost story. But, as more layers of its story are revealed, and you start to reach the climax, you start to see that there's much more going on here than meets the eye. And I liked that approach to this movie, because it draws you in with, essentially, a basic set-up and it turns it into something else entirely by its end. Is what the movie turns into good? Well, that's to be debated. I'll get to that point later. I read a blurb of this flick's LA Times' review and this blurb said that the film was short of shocks but heavy on atmosphere. And, you know what, I would agree with that. This movie isn't necessarily about the horror or the jump scares, though there ware a few of them, this is all about the tension that's built up through its atmosphere and how Henry's descent into madness reveals the truth of what happened to him and his wife. The movie does have some jump scares, but I don't think they ever felt cheap in this movie. This surprises me, since I'm a person who's quick to shit on jump scares. I never said they couldn't be done well, since Rec (one of my favorite horror movies ever) relies a lot on jump scares, but that movie is so intense and in your face, that you never know what's coming next. The Exorcist III has THE best jump scare I've probably ever seen in any horror movie. So it's not that I'm inherently against jump scares, they just have to be well-constructed and make sense within the context of the story. This movie makes good use of them, since, some of them at least, are used as clues to help you figure out what's going on here. I felt it work, perhaps not always, but it did here. The narrative is...fine. I think a lot of it all is, honestly, gonna come down to how you felt about the reveal at the end. Henry takes this appraisal job in order to provide for his wife and their unborn child. Henry's marriage, however, is struggling after it is revealed that he had an affair with this woman. The job is very lucrative, but there's a few...issues that present themselves once strange events start occurring and Henry finds himself in situations where he's being physically attacked or sensing ghostly presences. To be honest, while Henry's marriage to Rebecca is relevant to the overall narrative, I just found it (until the climax) to be a little uninteresting. It just felt like it was something for Henry to do aside from the appraisal job. This next part is gonna have some massive SPOILERS, so if you're reading on Flixster then look away. Basically, it all comes to be revealed that Henry and his wife have been dead all along. Mr. Remiel, the man who offered him the 'appraisal' job, is actually the owner of this estate, in purgatory it seems, where he's giving sinners the chance to repent for their mistakes when they were alive and be saved. Every character that Henry comes across in the film, that isn't Remiel, represents of the Seven Deadly Sins. If you fail to repent for your mistakes, you'll just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again in an endless loop. Which is why Henry saw ghostly figures of himself (that he didn't know was him at the time), since he's gone through this many other times. He "killed" himself during one of these experiments and set himself on fire the other time. I don't have a problem with this reveal at all, it's actually a clever little twist. The problem I have is with the fact that Remiel completely explains everything. They hold your hand through the entire reveal and it's just a little too much for me. I'm not trying to be cocky or anything, but I think I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm sure most people who watched this film would consider themselves smart. And this movie doesn't treat you like you are. I get why they did it, they wanted to answer every possible question you might have had to the best of their abilities. They didn't want their movies to be one of those where you have no idea what the fuck just happened. But it's not like this movie is The Void or Interstellar, they gave you enough visual clues for us to put our own pieces together. I just wish the film trusted its audience more than they did. The reveal explained too much, as absurd as that may seem to some. I think something needed to be left for the audience to figure out on their own and to debate over. There's really nothing to debate after this movie ends because they explain everything. But, I digress, the acting is perfectly solid all around, I can't complain. This an average horror film. I think its lack of real strong horror and its heavy-handed reveal took a bit away from this, but I still liked this more than the rating would imply. It's got some good ideas and some decent execution. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's clearly a labor of love and hard work and I don't regret watching this at all, even with its flaws.
★ 1 / 10
Absolute garbage, slow, drawn out, pathetic acting, and
R T
Absolute garbage, slow, drawn out, pathetic acting, and the story was a mess. Clean your gutters and you will have a better time then watching this trash.
Absolute garbage, slow, drawn out, pathetic acting, and the story was a mess. Clean your gutters and you will have a better time then watching this trash.
26%
AUDIENCE
4.5/10
992
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THE SUFFERING- The movie speaks for itself..