The Institute

I enjoyed this movie much more than I'd expected. The other reviews don't mention how much FUN it was. Yes it's an independent film but the premise and the actors were pretty good. The Couple worked well together and The Doctor was suitably creepy. It was certainly entertaining :)

I thought the actors portraying our protagonists, Daniel and Marie, did a reasonable job. Some have commented that the rest of the characters were not well acted, but I think it was a conscious decision on the part of the filmmakers to have most of the characters appear to be "wrong" in one way or another. The head of "The Institute" appeared somehow divorced from his emotions. I've seen worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

It's not easy to make a good movie so I feel bad being this brutal but this movie has a lot of problems.

First of all, I was immediately turned off but the opening scene CGI which wasn't great - to put it kindly. The odd thing is there was nothing really like it in the rest of the film. Thank goodness. At least there are some more practical effects that show up closer to the end of the movie that were pretty decent. If you can't do good CGI you should probably just avoid it. (Pro tip from someone who's never made a movie!)

Secondly, the acting could use some work. Some of the performers sound like they are reading their lines from a teleprompter. The male main lead Daniel gave a decent enough performance. Marie was good at being topless... I'll leave it at that.

I liked the concept behind the movie but the plot was only okay. I could basically guess what's going to happen most of the time, so I feel like they needed to add something more unexpected for the story to remain interesting.

There's a few decent bits of cinema photography but other times it looks a bit like cheap video. Perhaps it needed some atmospheric lighting? I don't know.

In the end it's more of a background movie to watch while you doom scroll on Twitter or watch cat videos on Tik Tok.

If you watch the trailer before watching the film you can clearly see that this is an ULB (maybe even no-budget) feature. As such you have to grade features like these on a curve. Does it trip up? For sure it does, but it's clear that a majority of the errors are budgetary. Look at their IMDb and you can see this was created by a bunch of first time feature filmmakers and knowing that I've seen A LOT WORSE. I hope these filmmakers get to make more movies.

I only watched this for the male lead who at least tries to act and has many nearly nude scenes. The females have some total nude scenes, and I mention the nudity because this film offers little else. At times it seems to border on an adult film, but it's just a dull and lifeless mess, in which characters only act in the way they act in bad movies. There is no horror or scares to this at all. Poorly filmed, it was obvious some scenes were filmed with a green screen and badly, as the actors were strangely outlined. Not worth anyone's time.