Dagr

Wow...this is one of the worst movies I've seen this year so far. They jabber on and make YouTube content for F O R T Y straight minutes. I'm not sure why I continued to watch past thirty minutes but I did.

I truly regret not turning it off then.

At 41 minutes the movies tries and fails to get interesting.

At 45 minutes in...we turned it off. It was THAT bad.

It's so bad that I felt obligated to write a review to save anyone else contemplating watching this.

Do not waste your time on this folks.

I repeat. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ON THIS MOVIE.

And if you do, don't pretend you weren't warned.

I like this genre: found footage horror with a dose of self awareness. But, the lead in is WAAAAYYYYY too long and it definitely doesn't need to be given how little info you actually need to understand for the film premise to make sense. Seemed like they were trying to kill time in order to make it a full feature. There are so. Many. Driving. Shots. Also a lot of talking to random farm animals that they encounter. In general I feel like the two main actors (the thieving girls) are meant to be cute-bubbly sorts but they are also a bit annoying, think Kitty and Lydia from Pride and Prejudice 2005. I think this is mostly the case though because there is so much filler so they are talking and exclaiming a lot but it's very unfocussed/doesn't need to be in the film. That being said, still giving 5 stars because it does get some good creepy bits in and there are some interesting story points in the second half of the film. But you can pretty much read the synopsis and skip the first half of the film without missing a beat.

Based on some really positive reviews, I watched this movie with the hope of finding a nice little horror gem. I was sadly disappointed.

As is typical of most (mediocre) horror, the film spends about 30 minutes in the preamble, but does very little to establish the setting or characters beyond some pretty standard tropes. Given the overall short runtime, I was floored that they spent nearly half the movie's screen time on inane establishing dialogue and nothing-burger scenes. Not even really much to foreshadow or set a creepy tone--just minute after minute of yawn-inducing banter.

Even the "scary" bits were completely tired, run-of-the-mill fodder like eerie whispers and doors closing. Nothing you haven't seen in dozens of other horror films. And that's pretty much the entire movie: rehashed, regurgitated horror tropes with very little novelty or innovation.

Don't believe the hype. This movie is middling dreck at best, and not worth your money if you're at all picky about your horror films.

Despite its short runtime, "Dagr" manages to bore the viewers within a short timespan. As a matter of fact, you have to sit through more than half the film before some attempts at horror tropes appear. This is just one of the more tangible evidences of Matthew Butler-Hart's struggles with the writing and direction of "Dagr". Whatever his point with this film was (I'm sure he had one) is not displayed even at the slightest. Some sort of social commentary? Who knows? When the folk horror themes is unraveled at the end, no answers are given anyways due to its convolution. And yes, we've seen the found-footage-within-a-found-footage horror movie trick before.

When two internet pranksters arrive to disrupt a photo-shoot, something evil decides to call it a wrap.

Just about the lowest rating I've given a movie.

A few references to film school and the profession suggest the makers are well aware of their craft, and there does seem to be an enormous number of cameras in play, but nothing is done with care or intelligence. As for the writing, it takes 30 minutes to dole out information that could have been injected through high-tempo montage. But then a literally in-your-face tribute to Blair Witch - followed by the fatigue of realizing that nobody in this production understood anything about that found-footage classic and its unifying concept. Instead, it delivers frights at the same level as one of those daft ghost-hunter TV shows - but without the shadows.

When presented with a spectacularly bad argument, scientists have a cutting put down: "not even wrong". This is the film version of that argument.

An extra point for the one glimmer of charm, the actor playing Thea, whose surname I'd like to pronounce nice and proper.