The first thing I thought in the first half hour of the film was "Twin Peaks" and "Laura Palmer. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the writer's and director's inspirations. Girl has demon following her, wanting to take her over. Girl does drugs to keep said demon at bay. Same situation in Twin Peaks. An abusive father, as well, which is also very much like TP: Leland Palmer. And let us Twin Peaks fans not forget who physically killed Laura Palmer. Get where I'm going with this? I'm a huge TP fan, and it made it very simple to see the correlation and I'm not absolutely sure if I like that or not. Many tv shows after TP tried to emulate the same ideas and emotions because it was so groundbreaking (like the X-Files, for instance), which was to be expected, but in a film? I'm sorry, but this director is no David Lynch and David Lynch already shot a little film about this very subject in Inner Demons, and he did it way better.
Aside from this, although I'm utterly tired of found footage films, I found this one not too bad. As far as the media crew who were documenting, the woman said it herself: " We're all whores." The psychiatrist the girl was dealing with was a clueless ass, wanting to send her to a mental institution after she speaks to him in an ancient language that realistically, she would never know. And here we know the father is violent, grabbing the camera and attempting to break it as well as threatening to sue. On one hand, we see that the father IS violent, but we also know that the psychiatrist could have easily been sued for malpractice. It is definitely a smack in the face to our fractured health system, which I like, being physically sick, myself. The good thing was that she at least had Jason on her side; the bad thing was how it ended--I don't mean bad script wise, technically, acting-wise...I mean it was horrific... as was the ending to TP: Fire Walk With Me.
I didn't have a problem with anyone's acting-- I mean, they were no phenomenon so, but they were capable. The plot, well, I covered that in the first paragraph. The storyline seemed believable: girl is drug addict but says so because she is trying to escape something. She agrees to go to rehab where she is going through detox, which is obviously making her feel worse since now she cannot escape this demon. She keeps telling the psychiatrist, who fails to take her literally and instead takes her words with a grain of salt, telling her the demon is a metaphor for the drugs and her struggles in detoxification,even after she speaks either Latin or some other ancient language that no 16-year-old American girl would know unless she happened to be a Satan worshipper...and even then, it's not easy to learn languages when you're already older and less impressionable, yet she's speaking these words fluently to the psychiatrist. I've gotta say, his acting sounded like a typical, condescending *beep* psychiatrist who thinks he knows and has seen and heard it all.
I'm using my iPad IMDB app and can't write reviews unless I go through the Internet where I'm not logged in and I forgot my password, so I'm just gonna go ahead and give my star review right here: 7 out of 10 stars. I liked it. It was actually pretty realistic, as opposed to the found footage films where a bunch of college kids go to some abandoned place where they're stupid enough to summon a demon or bad spirit and then decide to split up like complete morons and get picked off one by one because instead of just finding a way to get the hell out of there, they're too busy looking for one another. I took three off because although it's pretty good, it's not great, and I'm kind of tied between liking the obvious TP reference or not.
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