Rating: C
Dir: Nicolas Wendl, Dani Abraham
Star: Saad Rolando, Gage Robinson, Cass Huckabay, Alyssa Tortomasi
Shooting a feature film in a mere six days, on a budget of around ten thousand dollars, is certainly an admirable effort. But I wonder if a more measured approach might have been better here. There are some rough edges, especially in my personal bête noire of poor audio, which additional time would likely have helped smooth off. It’s the story of a dinner party, to which Jaxon (Rolando) has been invited by Celeste (Tortomasi), a girl he briefly encountered a few weeks previously. He has to bring two friends, because she shares her flat with two friends. His wingman is Rex (Robinson), but a late cancellation forces them to find a last-minute substitute in cable guy Stanley.
Initially, things go reasonably well. Then the power goes out, and a session of board games by candlelight is started. They play one called ‘Quest for Truth’, which similarly, begins innocently enough. However, the topics which the game covers become increasingly dark, and it also becomes clear the three young women have an agenda. They freak out after Stanley finds a weird statue, and that’s nothing compared to their reaction when it is accidentally broken by one of their guests. I’d best say no more, as the pleasures to be found here are heavily invested in the unfolding sense of what-the-fuckery, with things escalating, and the location becoming a inescapable apartment of horrors for both willing and unwilling participants in the game.
The pacing here is something of a problem, with the film slow to get to anything approximating action. Despite starting with Jaxon and Rex on their way to the event, it feels like an age before anything of significance happens. The characters aren’t bad, by the standards of low-budget spam in a cabin. However, the first thirty minutes definitely had me looking at my watch. Things improve the further in we go, and the makers’ commitment to cheap, practical effects, rather than cheap CGI, is laudable. It also looks better than the budget, and many bigger films could learn a lesson from this, about how to shoot “candlelight”, in a way the audience are not literally left in the dark.
The audio though? Not so much. The levels are all over the place, and you will perpetually find yourself adjusting the volume up and down. Sometimes, half of the same conversation is almost inaudible, and few things are more guaranteed to take me out of a film. It’s the clearest example of where the limited schedule and resources here, work against the end product. That aside though, there’s potential in most other elements. There were points where it felt this could have been an American remake of a film in the Siccin franchise, delivering a stern warning against the perils of dabbling in the occult. I’m interested to see where Wendl and team go from here.
The film is our now on Tubi and other streaming platforms.