A young man convinces his wife to give up everything so that they can move to a shack in the middle of nowhere that will enable him to film the best nature documentary ever. They discover that their neighbor may be an enigmatic artist named Mr. Jones who creates creepy scarecrows. As they dive deeper into the mystery than they should, they discover that Mr. Jones may be creating totems to protect them from the dream world and they may have just ruined that protection and unleashed nightmare forces upon them.
What a great concept, right? I was drawn into what could have been a great movie, but ultimately doesn't have the creative forces behind it to bring that idea to any sort of reasonable fruition. It does start off pretty good. The acting from the only two real characters in the movie is pretty good for a low budget horror film, though we are not really given any background or development that truly makes us learn anything about these people so that we'll care about them down the road. They are just an anonymous couple who seem to have given up life to be artists. They discover Mr. Jones cabin fairly early on in the film and there's some promise there as the scarecrows are pretty effectively made and lend some atmosphere to things, though let's not pretend these are original in any way. They're essentially more twisted versions of the policeman scarecrow in CHILDREN OF THE CORN.
The first big problem in the movie is the found footage style. I'm not a hate of found footage, like so many others seem to be and I do not think it makes a movie garbage right off the bat, but you have to be using it for a reason, and you have to be consistent with it to give it the right feel. There's no reason for this to exist as found footage. Nothing is gained by the pretense of this being filmed by the characters, rather than just admitting it's a movie. Worse, it's really inconsistently shot. There are voice-overs, text overlays to introduce characters in interviews and shots that just plain could not have been created by the characters' filming at all. It breaks up the illusion of "found footage" even more and destroys it pretty much. They would have been much better off just telling this as a straightforward narrative.
The biggest problems with the movie come once things start getting strange. Basically, things are just getting strange for the sake of being strange featuring a lot of random imagery and sounds, quick cuts from shot to shot and scene to scene and nonsense storytelling. It quickly becomes very hard to tell what's going on, or for that matter to even see what's going on in a lot of shots. It's all done under the pretense of being "dreamlike", but the reality is that it's a convenient excuse to not have to actually tell much of a story, to not have to create an actual narrative that makes sense, to not have to back up your plot with any events that would support what happens. You can just fill your fun time with anything you want to and say "it's a dream". A 4-year old's scribbling may be images in their mind, but few of us know what the picture is supposed to be and that's basically what this movie is.
It all leads to a climax that I'm sure the director thinks is very clever and people who want to feel artsy will tell you has some grand meaning to be discussed in length. It means nothing because nothing that happened in the movie proceeding it has any real value. Random images leading to a random conclusion. That is all.
What a great concept, right? I was drawn into what could have been a great movie, but ultimately doesn't have the creative forces behind it to bring that idea to any sort of reasonable fruition. It does start off pretty good. The acting from the only two real characters in the movie is pretty good for a low budget horror film, though we are not really given any background or development that truly makes us learn anything about these people so that we'll care about them down the road. They are just an anonymous couple who seem to have given up life to be artists. They discover Mr. Jones cabin fairly early on in the film and there's some promise there as the scarecrows are pretty effectively made and lend some atmosphere to things, though let's not pretend these are original in any way. They're essentially more twisted versions of the policeman scarecrow in CHILDREN OF THE CORN.
The first big problem in the movie is the found footage style. I'm not a hate of found footage, like so many others seem to be and I do not think it makes a movie garbage right off the bat, but you have to be using it for a reason, and you have to be consistent with it to give it the right feel. There's no reason for this to exist as found footage. Nothing is gained by the pretense of this being filmed by the characters, rather than just admitting it's a movie. Worse, it's really inconsistently shot. There are voice-overs, text overlays to introduce characters in interviews and shots that just plain could not have been created by the characters' filming at all. It breaks up the illusion of "found footage" even more and destroys it pretty much. They would have been much better off just telling this as a straightforward narrative.
The biggest problems with the movie come once things start getting strange. Basically, things are just getting strange for the sake of being strange featuring a lot of random imagery and sounds, quick cuts from shot to shot and scene to scene and nonsense storytelling. It quickly becomes very hard to tell what's going on, or for that matter to even see what's going on in a lot of shots. It's all done under the pretense of being "dreamlike", but the reality is that it's a convenient excuse to not have to actually tell much of a story, to not have to create an actual narrative that makes sense, to not have to back up your plot with any events that would support what happens. You can just fill your fun time with anything you want to and say "it's a dream". A 4-year old's scribbling may be images in their mind, but few of us know what the picture is supposed to be and that's basically what this movie is.
It all leads to a climax that I'm sure the director thinks is very clever and people who want to feel artsy will tell you has some grand meaning to be discussed in length. It means nothing because nothing that happened in the movie proceeding it has any real value. Random images leading to a random conclusion. That is all.