alex_with_a_P

The Soul Collector has it's heart at the right place, you can tell the people involved wanted to make a good movie, that is especially noticeable during the ending which is quite ambitious and it was for me the only saving grace.

There are though, a handful technical problems that made the movie mediocre unfortunately, none of it is the fault of it's mid-budget. First the positive features: it has an interesting antagonist (on paper) who doesn't just appear as a foil, we spent considerable amount of time with him, which is a really interesting choice, and the right choice or the story.

The other good part is the south-african landscape, some moments are really contemplative and it's weaved in with a good score. Also we get two good acting performances by Tshamano Sebe (Lazarus) and Luxolo Ndabedi (Suno - the young villager). And like mentioned before the ending is neat, it feels meditative and personal. It's a touch that we rarely see anymore (especially in big budget films) and it puts the move a notch above mediocrity. But I still can't give the movie a recommend due to problems in execution. Like others mentioned it is more drama than it is a horror film, but the trouble is, that it fails to dramatize any of the events that take place. Script needed so much more polish, especially the dialogues are rough: For example, the intro sequence with the family driving through the landscape is exactly the same as in The Shining, even their dialogue is lifted almost verbatim from it. But here it feels kind of lifeless. The story might work for a short film, but for a feature it is too barebones: like I said the antagonist gets fleshed out (more or less) but the other party, the girl and her family are sadly genre tropes.

The relationship between the girl and her family is almost absent, there is no real interaction or personal moments between them. We understand the aunt's behaviour but the uncle has little interaction with her as well, almost seems like a fairytale how bland the adults are described here. The other point is that the editing is sometimes bad, in a way that it tries to do something artistic (sometimes clumsily) but is only taking the attention off the story, which is the opposite of what editing is supposed to be (good editing is invisible). The music and themes are endless variations of Tchaikovsky's Swan Song and it gets very repetitive over time.

In terms of horror it also falls short, it has some creepy imagery (the bag), it is a visual idea taken from J-Horror films but is used too many times, each times it gets used, it gets less scarier. It's a film that is hard to recommend, it has a slow build towards the showdown, maybe people who like the atmoshperic sort of folk horror and care less about story might enjoy it.

I have no idea why everyone is raving about this movie. It's the usual tired sequel of an original horror film, just with a bigger budget. It doesn't expand on the lore, it doesn't even try to do something original with the curse: like having maybe two persons be cursed at the same time, that would make matters more complicated to get rid of it. Instead we get the same story again just with a pop star who is a recovering addict. The addiction angle has been a tired trope in horror films for some time now and this movie didn't do anything creative with it either. The worst offense is that the movie is less scary and goes all out on gore instead. I was bored because every beat of the downfall of our protagonist is completely predictable, you see both twists coming from a mile away. When you have an entity that can create entire scenarios and characters from scratch than you can basically show any wild event and end it with the "it was all a dream" gimmick. This gimmick was used appropriately on the first movie for the ending. Here it gets repeated a zillion times from the beginning and it gets old real fast. The rules how the curse works are very blurry, they say the demon spreads and takes over after a couple of days or a week. Judging by the first twist though, the demon already had full access to the memory and head space of our protagonist and there was less of an escalation happening here. The ending didn't hit as hard as intended, I was bored because the running time was stretched thin over two hours for a familiar premise that could have easily been 90 minutes. This movie did absolutely nothing for me, it's basically a rehash of the first movie with a cliché celebrity point of view.