Where's Rose

The people who know me personally or my taste & preferences in films are pretty much familiar with the fact that I often like to take my chances with low-budget independent works.

Why do I do that? Well, being an avid cinephile, I am always in search of deserving, underrated titles. At times, I do happen to stumble upon some worthy features, however, in most cases, I return empty-handed.

"Where's Rose", Unfortunately enlists itself to my latter list of disappointments.

Whilst I appreciate the story for at least trying to be innovative and bring something new (kinda) to the table; the execution, however, leaves a lot to be desired. The direction here is inefficient, the editing should have been more sharper, more articulative! The performances aren't exactly horrible, although I do feel, with a more experienced cast things could have panned out in a much better fashion.

A decent attempt nonetheless.

Thought I would give this a shot after seeing a trailer on Netflix. Super slow movie and as others have noted #1 the acting was fairly weak. I'm not sure how people didn't see the big twist coming after the 1st 30 min. I finished the film just to be sure but it was as I suspected.

Definitely a very low budget film that had promise but it's just too slow and uneventful to take serious.

The parents are horrible and probably the weakest actors in the film. The special effects are very subpar even for a low budget film.

I like indie films and respect filmmakers that have a vision and don't have big Hollywood money. However, in this case I wish I had passed on this one.

Day #2

So, this is a bit of a strange one. The ambition was there and Mathis does a great job overall but the treatment used to cover the overall theme may have been a misstep.

Hovering somewhere between a Lifetime Sunday Feature, Arthouse and Fantasy (think Guillermo del Toro) the movie is over before you can truly commit.

The flow and pacing were acceptable, and I credit Mathis for attacking such brave subject matter, however it never truly gels and one feels sated solely from the socially conscious message, getting nothing from the horror elements at all.

Also, the acting was very uneven, save for Ty Simpkins, Annaliese Judge and Skyler Elise Philpot.

5.5/10

#31DaysOfHalloween2022.

My main question after finishing this one was: What?

Seriously, I have no idea what this movie was about or how it wrapped up. It began with a simple enough plot: A little girl goes missing and when she's found, her overachieving older brother feels there's something different about the lass.

And thus ends the only part of the movie I understood. Maybe there's a lot of symbolism flying over my head here, but to my eye, they just mangled this story to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp and put haunting music over it to fool you into thinking it was a horror movie.

I'd be worried about spoiling the ending for new viewers, but truthfully, bros. I don't think I could if I tried. I honestly don't know if this was a story of madness, a creature feature, or a tender Lifetime film about the importance of family, or perhaps a cautionary tale about the trouble with killing siblings.

I thought the little girl was a fine actress. She was downright spooky at times. So there. I said something about the movie, can you just leave me alone now?

Took me a while to get round to this purely because some of the reviews were very negative.

When I did eventually watch it, I was so glad I did.

It's a great little mystery horror. Despite a low budget, the cinematography is great, the acting is on-point (with a few forgivable exceptions) and the script is clever. Theres' a twist that is sign-posted throughout but never obviously enough that it ruins the ending. I had suspicions of what was going to happen but still found the final reveal rewarding.

There are several negative reviews on IMDB but, for the most part, these seem to miss the point. In particilar, a review titled "Doesn't make any sense" misses the point entirely. There's more than one way to interpret this film and there is a lot of scope to unpick the symbolism; that reviewer clearly just took the whole thing literally.

As I said in the title, if slowburn horror appeals to you, and you don't mind lower-budgey (but still very well made!) indie films, you could do a lot worse than this!