Rating: C-
Dir: Luke Shaw.
Star: Luke Shaw, Arna Reed, Dylan Guest, Michael Mills.
The mockumentary supposedly details the investigation of film-maker Patrick Jones (Shaw) and his girlfriend, Sarah Stewart (Reed). They are looking into a series of nine brutal murders which took place around Adelaide in Australia. They were all pinned on a man called Max Lammasche. Information about the culprit is suspiciously hard to come by, and his low-education background doesn’t fit the surgical precision with which the victims had limbs removed. There are rumblings in online forums about a group called “The Household”, comprising politicians and other high-level folk. But nobody is willing to go on the record. A YouTuber called Dan (Guest) and a persistent cop, Robert Dandy (Mills), potentially offer Mark a source of information.
However, the further down the rabbit hole he and Sarah go, the murkier things become, and the more apparent it is that somebody wants to stop them. Initially there are harassing phone calls. When they persist in the investigation, fake criminal charges suddenly turn up on Mark’s record. His bank account is frozen, and their apartment is broken into and ransacked. Dan goes missing, and things only escalate from there. I like the idea of this considerably more than the finished film. It’s plagued by plot holes from the ground up. Most obviously, why do those lurking in shadows target Mark and Dan? They know almost nothing: it’s Dandy who has far more information, and would present much more of a threat.
This kind of thing repeatedly derails proceedings, with behaviour which makes little or no sense. Another example: at one point, Mark goes on a road-trip and stays in the same motel room where one victim had his limbs cut off while still alive. He even points out the “paper-thin” walls. If I was going to dismember someone – and admittedly, I speak as someone with zero experience in the dismemberment department – that would be the last place I’d do it. As a result, proceedings here never have more than a thin veneer of plausibility. Nothing stands up to scrutiny, and it feels more like some kind of campfire story, made up on the fly by an eleven-year-old. It’s a pity, because the artistic style isn’t bad.
Occasional moments do trigger the intended chill of the spine. Oddly, the bit which worked best for me was a phone call, where a robotic voice simply recited Patrick and Sarah’s information: date of birth, address, etc. As a “We know all about you,” moment, it was highly effective. A few simple tweaks, such as making Dandy a whistleblower on the inside of the cult, would have gone a long way. I’d also have been more ruthless in the editing, because there are a number of scenes, such as them just hanging out with their friends, which are superfluous. This is the kind of film which should never let the viewer come up for air, instead keeping the screws being tightened relentlessly. It only does so intermittently.