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.

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.

The film can be vague, but it should be understandable by your audience. Also, you need to give enough interesting character dialogue and show progression not to lose your viewer. Following general horror cliches with creepy kids, occult imagery, scary faces, and frightening toilet doors are not enough.

The Pond contains a very hazy and muffled general idea about hell, God, religion, and humanity. This is not, however, well communicated in the film besides some random disconnected pseudophilosophical dialogue delivered through acting so stiff its density cannot be penetrated by any known material in the world.

So, if you are not willing to bleed your brain you will most likely just feel extremely bored and confused throughout the film. Most viewers will catch the obvious symbolism (and homages to the classic films and literature) like the seven deadly sins projected through the characters, seven days of creation, and the circles, oh man, the circles. But these details serve no real purpose but to make the last 5 minutes of the film almost understandable.

Confused viewers might think this movie is too deep and smart for them just because it makes no sense - but it's not.

They should've just stuck to something understandable and time-tested. Want to show a visual representation of hell - borrow more from Jacob's Ladder, 1408, whatever. Want to tell a creepy occult story with interesting ideas buffed with existential crisis? Copy True Detective Season 1. Oh, wait, they have already done that. Want to explore religion? Make a dialogue-based film like The Man From Earth in the cool location you have, why not.

Just not everything at once.

I can't recommend this. 3/10, 1 star for the looks and visuals, 1 for the soundtrack (which felt confused about what it was trying to follow), 1 for Paul Leonard Murray's acting.

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.

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.