Rating: E
Dir: Ramon Porto Mota
Star: Rana Sui, Ana Rita Gurgel, Felipe Espindola, Matheus Martins
I am increasingly beginning to realize that my tolerance for young people – at least in their cinematic incarnation – is significantly less than feature length. Having recently endured Russia’s Pain Threshold, this Brazillian entry shows it is an international phenomenon. I do not feel we need to be importing this kind of thing. I’m sure we have plenty of irritating domestic movie teenagers. #MakeAmericansGrateAgain In this case, I think the point it jumped the shark was when two characters sat and watched a videotape lecture on quantum physics. The babbling incoherence it contained, somehow managed to be notably more interesting than anything else the film had provided to that point.
It’s a group of recent high school grads, who celebrate their new-found freedom, with a trip to a mansion on an island, owned by the late grandfather of Monica (Gurgel). As soon as they show up, the warning flags start running up the flagpole. Naturally, these are entirely ignored, and the group plough on to the spooky, deserted house. Which would be fair enough, except do you know what then happens? Nothing. No, really. They sit around and chat, obligatory Goth girl Karina (Sui) goes for a wander on her own, and the highlight is getting to watch that lecture on Quantum Mechanics 1.0.1. The film itself gets bored with proceedings, and so we get a lengthy flashback to a party on the mainland. Don’t worry. It, too, serves little purpose.
This demonstrates the problem of relying on atmosphere and subtle understatement in horror. When it fails – and, boy, does it fail here – you are left with nothing. If you rely on gratuitous violence and nudity and fail, you will at least still have bad gratuitous violence and nudity. Here, you get a near-record amount of slowly walking around in the dark, “enlivened” – quotes used advisedly – by banal dialogue. For example, one teen goes into interminable detail about how he’s an “old soul”. When he dies, he wants his ashes to be paraded around town, thrown in the faces of passers-by, and mixed with corn to be fed to pigeons. Sounds bad? It’s worse to watch. If you were at a party, you’d fake a seizure to escape the conversation.
There is basically no palpable threat here, leading to no sense of peril. Up until almost the end, nothing continues to happen to anyone, and then… Well, if pushed: something something dimensional portal something? Maybe it would have made more sense had I been riveted to the screen for the preceding hour thirty minutes. But when a movie has done such a lousy job of holding the viewer’s interest, it’s hardly my responsibility to figure out how the ending should be assembled logically.