The Pond

My theory: Somebody had a bunch of ideas for horror movie visuals and tried to string them all together without really coming up with a story. It's too bad, the trailer looked pretty amazing.

This atmospheric horror has some decent camera work but absolutely terrible writing and acting. The dialogue should never have been translated into English, given that they end up with broken nonsense ("How are you doing? I wanted to check out on you."). The mangled script is poorly delivered, and even when it's possible to guess what they mean, the underlying plot is nonsense. The only thing it has going for it is professional photography and ok sound design.

Definitely not a movie for everybody, really makes you think afterwards. I saw the trailer and recognized symbols that intrigued me right away since I'm interested into occult-like movies. Now that I've watched it, I somewhat grasped the idea, but I'll have to watch it again in order to fully understand the ending. Liked the portrayal of the seven princes of Hell. Some of the acting was a bit over the top, though.

There were two moments in this movie that I simply adored and I did everything possible in order to hang onto them in order to make this movie better than it actually is. But in the end, it comes off as pretentious and not as elegant as it might hope to be.

Sure, some scenes manage to pull you out of the boredom, even get you invested in the movie, but it is not something that one would easily appreciate, just look at the comments, the reviews online, people called it too much style over substance because it is, tried to be too smart for its own good and managed to get itself stuck in a bad place. Also, this is a psychological movie, not a horror, it doesn't explore the murder section at all, but believe me, it is a good thing, a better thing, yet it still doesn't manage to bring any kind of satisfaction. If you were to compare it to a sugar rush, just imagine having no sugar, nor rush. Just a viewer, hoping for some crumbs to be thrown to him, but never getting any.

Cheers!

It's very possible that I missed certain nuance throughout this film that further expanded the actual story...but it just was not good and did not make sense. It is shot well, but the acting is subpar, the characters are not properly explained, the dialogue is clunky, and it uses an audio overlay instead of live audio...so you see their lips moving but it's clear you're hearing something different.

The plot is some guy testing a water source and interacting with hallucinations that aren't hallucinations? It's not explained. It's just people walking around with paper bags on their heads and the main character losing his mind but nothing is explained at all. They attempt an explanation between the main character and his University lead and it is just word salad with a doom dressing.

It's just not a good story line ultimately, and that's it's entire issue. It had the budget and film crew to do something really creative, the story could have been really interesting, but the director chose to be vague when it came to the plot so you simply don't care what happens by the end because you're so bored or confused.