Bloat

Right off the bat, I cannot recommend this film for any reason whatsoever; This was an absolute dretch to get through. Nonexistant plot with scenes smacked together, very poor acting accompanied by laughable "chemistry", "dialog" and "story" - there's none of it here. There's plenty of times you could laugh during this film, but it's for all the reasons you wouldn't want to be laughed at - film editing is abysmal alongside the very loud and mishmashed audio, continually displaying some really bad CGI garbage that's supposed to draw us in with mystery, it doesn't. Call me a full blown hater for this film, but I can genuinely tell anyone reading this - you will thank me for telling you this film just isn't it. Absolutely nothing was redeeming about it, it's not interesting, scary, enthralling - it's scenes to bloat runtime.

Given my love of all things horror, then of course I opted to sit down and watch "Bloat", as I had the opportunity to do so here in 2025. Sure, I had never even heard about the movie, and all I knew about it was the fact that it was a horror movie. Which, essentially, was all that I needed to know to make me watch the movie. So I didn't have any expectations to writer and director Pablo Absento, really, so he had every opportunity to entertain and impress me.

But talk about a swing and a miss of a movie. You have to watch this garbage heap yourself in order to fathom how lousy film making it actually is. A large portion of the movie is spent with the audience watching Jack (played by Ben McKenzie) sitting at his computer and doing online searches and watching questionable videos. It was insanely boring and laughable to attempt to pass that off as being entertainment. I have to say that this movie, with writer and director Pablo Absento at the helm, was a massive swing and a miss.

And it didn't help that a lot of the footage in the movie was filmed with hand-held, shaky camera and layered with a lot of interference filters. It was downright annoying to bear witness to. Plus, a large portion of the movie seemed to be filmed on the performer's mobile phones.

Of the entire cast ensemble, I was only familiar with leading actor Ben McKenzie and actress Bojana Novakovic. The acting performances in the movie were actually fair, despite the fact that the movie itself was a dumpster fire.

If you enjoy horror movies and prefer to watch a properly filmed and an actually entertaining horror movie, then give "Bloat" a wide, wide berth. It simply isn't worth the film it was recorded on. And wasting 86 minutes on this garbage heap just isn't worth the effort. Some of us literally suffered through this amateurish and home-made attempt of a horror movie, so you don't have to; you're very welcome. This is not a movie that will find its way back to my screen a second time.

My rating of writer and director Pablo Absento's 2025 movie "Bloat" lands on a very generous two out of ten stars.

I will preface this by saying I am a huge fan of Screenlife. Searching is one of my top favorite movies, so when this movie came out, I was excited to see it since it's more of a horror, like Unfriended (another movie I strongly enjoyed). Unfortunately, this is not comparable to either Searching or Missing.

• The writing. This movie, in the plot synopsis alone, is great. In execution, however, the plot is a clunky mess with almost cringy dialogue. (They make a Supernatural reference partway through! Why?) I saw reviews that say the format held it back, but I don't even think a conventional film could save this.

It uses a clip from Unfriended as if it actually happened, which would be fine, but it's specifically from the Skype call and not the in-universe internet media. That makes no sense; who was recording it, and who published it after?

• The pacing. Some parts drag painfully slowly, and some parts speed at breakneck. It's unwatchable. I never look away from my screen during movies, but I found myself desperately wanting to during this one. - The acting. I'm sure the lead guy is a good actor, but his work in this film is nothing short of terrible. It's flat, stunted, and the few times he's not just staring at a monitor, his physical direction is just... not there. His friend, however, is the actual worst actor in the film. He speeds through his lines like a table read, with no emotion, as if they went with the very first take and nothing more. The mom's alright, and the kid actors do a better job than the lead. Disappointing.

• The visual look. I'm pretty picky when it comes to tech accuracy in these movies, and this one falls surprisingly short. Everything we see in the film is perfect 4K with film grain, not something you'd see from a cellphone camera or a 16-year-old YouTube video (something actually shown in the film). The other Bazelevs productions weren't like this, so clearly the crew of *this one* is the issue. Every scary shot in the film is watered down with an overblown datamosh like you took all the bad parts of Unfriended: Dark Web and mashed them to a pulp. Grammatical and spelling errors plague just about every line of text, continuity errors in window locations, statuses, and the IMPORTANT SITE OF THE FILM SWITCHING BETWEEN '. ORG' and '. COM'. I can not overstate how major an oversight that is. That should be, like, the first thing you get down.

TL;DR: Don't even bother watching this. A 'Mystery Recapped' AI video could do a better job of explaining the plot than the movie itself could.

This whole thing was literally written by AI and the horror was definitely made by it too; it was extremely boring and literally made no sense. The pacing is slow, the characters are boring, the sound is horrible (not scary at all) and even the visuals are blurry throughout most of the film. I expected a Japanese American film to be like the ring or the grudge, but boy was I wrong. Don't waste your time watching this, I spent $5.99 to see it on YouTube and really wished I didn't. I can see better AI horror for free online without wasting an hour and a half of my time. All in all, worst movie I've seen in years.

This movie was ridiculous. It made no sense. It was so boring. It looked like the whole thing was made on an iPhone. Actually I'm sure there were better films made with iPhones that had better storylines than this. They tried to make it all artsy and tech, but to me it was just a cheap cop out, basically the whole movie was them FaceTime each other and just a very boring drawn out movie that made no sense. If you saw the trailer, you saw the entire movie. I fast-forward did most of the movie through the boredom just to get to the end to see if it would get any better, I feel sorry for anyone that was recommended this movie even if that was possible. I wish I could give it negative scores. Please don't waste your time and definitely don't waste your money. Go stare at the wall, go for a walk, do anything but watch this movie. I am not even kidding when I tell you this was the worst movie - it left me angered that I wasted time out of my life, expecting something to happen, anything to happen, guess what,? Nothing happened.