Rating: C
Dir:Parker Finn
Star: Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert
This is based on Finn’s short film, Laura Hasn’t Slept. That ran for eleven minutes, and to be honest you can tell. The feature version is more than ten times the length, but does not contain ten times the content. It’s a good idea, to be clear. I just didn’t feel Finn did enough with it. He may have shot himself in the foot with a barnstormer of an opening sequence. I found myself waiting for the film to regain those heights thereafter, and ended up disappointed that it did not do so.
The beginning sees Rose Cotter (Bacon), who works at an emergency psychiatric ward. She is called to see a patient who claims she is being terrorized by an entity that can take any form, and has foretold her own death. This comes horribly true as the previously hysterical woman suddenly becomes calm, and slits her own throat, grinning as she does so. Ok, you have my attention. Now what? Thereafter, Laura begins to have increasingly bizarre, yet very realistic, hallucinations. Initially, she blames these on overwork, but as they get worse, her fiancé Trevor (Usher) and therapist Dr. Northcott (Weigert) become concerned. Not least because Laura is convinced her late patient passed a deathly curse onto her, and with the help of cop Joel (Gallner), uncovers an ongoing series of suicides, affecting dozens of people.
There’s nothing particularly new about the concept of a transmittable curse. Night of the Demon was in many ways a similar idea, sixty-five years earlier. Then there was The Ring, in both Japanese and American versions, while It Follows went there more recently, replacing death with sex as a way to pass it to another victim. It does share one of the problems of It Follows, in that the curse is a not exactly subtle metaphor, in this case for trauma, with Rose never having recovered after her mother committed suicide. This has led to a breakdown in the relationship with her sister, made worse by… subsequent incidents, shall we say. I’ve now got a 100% foolproof way, to ensure I will never again receive an invitation to attend your brat’s tiresome birthday party (top).
I also learned the best way to deal with trauma, is to set fire to it. I suppose there’s a chance I may be misinterpreting the movie’s message there, since my attention was definitely beginning to waver by the time we approached the end. It had largely ceased to be a horror film, and was more following Rose as she tracked down previous victims, and the one man who had previously managed to survive the curse. Then, it’s as if the director suddenly remembered the genre in which he was operating, and the psychological terrors take on a physical form, for no clear reason. Finn does have a good eye for visual storytelling, with some interesting camera shots. These just need a better hook on which to hang them.