Bloat

I enjoyed this movie because I also enjoyed its older sister movies: Found & Searching? Whatever they were called. I guess the POV is from the father & what he's searching / doing on his laptop & you get to see that more than the father's expression reading the article. So you see him searching these haunted webpages but ultimately you don't see his expression, so you don't know if he believes in it until he speaks to someone else regarding it.

I enjoyed the cast of characters, the acting is a lil cheesy, esp on the sons. The mom is playing a typical suburban cloud in the heads mom & if the father was there they'd prob be arguing over what the father believes to be true vs the mom's denial. It's crazy to see the dad's POV, how he is not there but he knows something's going on.

Idk I liked this movie, I liked the other two movies that took its format. So despite the other bad reviews, I hope they continue making movies like this! At the end you just want to buy a Apple laptop too 😉 good promotion lol.

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.

Bloat combines the "screenlife" horror genre with Japanese folklore, centered on a family tormented by a Kappa. While the digital-first format effectively creates a sense of isolation and dread, its execution of the mythical creature is disappointing.

For those familiar with Japanese folklore, the film's portrayal of the Kappa feels like a mismatch. The creature, a well-known water-dwelling trickster, is simplified into a generic possession demon. The movie introduces details like the Kappa's love for cucumbers but then abandons them in favor of standard horror tropes, failing to capitalize on the unique and creepy potential of the original myth.

Ultimately, Bloat is a visually intriguing but narratively frustrating horror film. It's an atmospheric ride that will appeal to fans of the screenlife genre, but its missed opportunity to authentically explore the Kappa mythos leaves it feeling conventional and uninspired.

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.

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.