Okay movie - but has nothing to do with MK-Ultra

Minor spoilers ahead:

The movie started interesting enough with the news footage of scientists talking mind control and Bill Clinton officially apologizing for MK-Ultra, but in this case it's just false advertising.
If you take this kind of footage, then really show what MK-Ultra was / is really about. A real MK-Ultra movie would instantly shock this half-assed stairwell-leg-grabber into catatonia.

The itle Banshee Chapter could suggest, that this could be taken as being part of the side effects of MK-Ultra, as in MK-ULtra: the Banshee Chapter, but still. If you use that label, you have to deliver.

If it was supposed to suggest that MK-Ultra was stopped because of the Banshee effect (which it didn't, because it wasn't), then they should have put a little more effort into that line of reasoning.

It would have been enough for them to say: the CIA experimented with a dangerous drug and things went horribly wrong. There was no need to throw the label MK-Ultra into the mix, when it has nothing to with it.


Not knowing what it wants to be is the main problem of this movie. Case in point, using found footage as a mere gimmick. Another wasted opportunity, another thing on which the movie doesn't deliver.

I usually like an approach that doesn't keep too stringently to conformity. If a movie has found footage in it, it doesn't necessarily need to be found footage only.

If the found footage fits into the overall plot, fine. But here the movie starts out as some sort of documentary and not evene halfway in completely forgets about what it was going for. That's just stupid.

The found footage material was a gimmick that was so quickly abandoned, that you wonder why it was there in the first place. The only real found footage was the DMT trip in the beginning and in the CIA test facility.

And the short little VHS tape fizzes, trying to be a reminder that the whole movie is supposed to be a recovered VHS tape is less than a lazy effort, because no one in this supposedly found footage is filming anything.


The thrid missed opportunity is the lack of character development. They could have had Winter's character become more frantic over the course of the movie, considering all the frightening things she encounters. But she's in and out of it. One second she's scared out of her mind, the next she acts as if nothing happened. Thus you are unable to take her serious, much less identify with her.
You're watching her thinking "As if she would go there, as if she would do that". If she is so stupid you could strangle her with a cordless phone, she shouldn't get away with it. But she does.
Because of that the movie fails to develop a real sense of threat.

And just as unrealistic as the behaviour of the character(s), is the behaviour of the agency that's tied to the movie. As if there would be no security whatsoever around a facility that's basically supposed to be Area 51. Af if the aliens would just let her waltz in there and kill one of them.


But even if I'm bashing the movie left and right, I still enjoyed it ...somewhat.

Taken out of context, some scenes have a great atmosphere about them.

Ted Levine's acting was superb and I really love his Hunter Thompson inspired character. He alone lifts the rating of the movie by one star.

I loved the sountrack especially "Girl in the window", and am glad to have found Mark Lenover's unique talent because of this movie.

The idead has a lot of potential. The basic premise of the movie is great. The execution not so much.

Better luck next time.

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All I can see is an owl, but I know it's not an owl.