Lovely Molly

Her parents both dead, Molly (Gretchen Lodge) moves into her childhood home with trucker husband Tim (Johnny Lewis); but while Tim is away at work, Molly begins to experience terrifying occurrences that make her believe that she is being haunted by the spirit of her abusive father. As the terror mounts nightly, Molly—an ex-junkie—finds herself returning to her old habits for comfort...

Eduardo Sánchez's Lovely Molly begins with a close-up of a distraught Molly speaking directly to her video camera—a scene that directly references Heather Donahue's classic monologue from Sánchez's 1999 hit The Blair Witch Project; it's a rather amusing move by the director, one that blatantly acknowledges the similarities in technique and style between his new film and that with which he first made his name.

Thankfully, despite a very familiar feel to proceedings throughout (particularly thanks to a fair amount of shaky hand-held video footage), Lovely Molly does mark another level of progression for Sánchez as a film-maker: it is a technically superior piece to Blair Witch, the plot being far more complex and the production more polished, but more importantly, it sees the director using tricks developed on his first few films much more effectively, taking the terror to new heights.

Certainly for the first hour or so, Lovely Molly succeeds in being one of the scariest movies in a long while, Sánchez using his tried and trusted bag of tricks—creepy noises, impenetrable blackness, a well developed sense of vulnerability—to ramp up the tension to pant-wetting levels; he is aided in no small part by a fine central performance from Lodge (who is indeed very lovely!) and excellent sound design which adds immensely to the eerie atmosphere.

Sadly, the nearer the film approaches the end, the less it succeeds in chilling the spine: Sánchez slowly loses his grip on proceedings, with way too many plot details hurriedly brought into play, and the ambiguous nature of the narrative leading to utter confusion rather than fright. Ultimately, the viewer is left to question whether Molly has lost her mind or whether there really was a supernatural explanation for her behaviour. Reaching a satisfactory conclusion ain't easy.

8 out of 10 for the first hour; 5 out of 10 for the rest (an average of 6.5/10 by my calculations, which gets rounded up to a 7 for IMDb).

Look the movie is creepy and got me suspended for a long time. It was successful in creating suspense and intensity but in my opinion fails to deliver a message or an ending.

There is a moment towards the end where Molly goes out to hug "someone" I am not gonna say it so I wont spoil it for you but I keep wondering what on earth did they think when they were making this scene! Another part that I will vaguely criticize is the struggle-less death that happened in the movie. It just doesn't make any sense.

Overall, I gave the movie 6 stars because it was exciting and creepy but I was pretty disappointed with the end and how things developed eventually.

I rarely criticise a movie for its technical choices rather than its script or character development. However, this instance stands out, as I find it necessary to commend the storyline for addressing some sensitive (and significant) subject matters but cannot and will not extend the same degree of appreciation to its execution on the broader level.

The mixed style, continuously oscillating between found footage and conventional cinematography was frustrating. A more decisive approach in selecting one particular style would have benefited the script I reckon.

Regarding the narrative, I was captivated by how it gradually builds tension while delving into darker themes. The darkness is pursued, not rushed into and it embraces it completely as we reach conclusion.

Incorporation of psychological trauma with a suggested entity of malevolence was a genuinely ingenious idea that could have yielded a superior outcome had it not been executed in such a technically as well as tonally convoluted way.

Before I finish I must specifically mention the performance of Gretchen Lodge in the lead role. She delivered an outstanding portrayal of a woman showing scars of past trauma and slowly descending into madness, which was quite impressive for a film of this scope and ambition.

Director Eduardo Sánchez begins his newest spooky feature Lovely Molly with a deliberate shout out the the film that brung him here, The Blair Witch Project (co-directed with Daniel Myrick). A crying woman confesses into a videocamera, capturing herself in a moment of distress and hoping to leave a clue to be discovered after she inevitably succumbs to an off-screen terror. Sánchez hasn't returned exactly to his old stomping ground of first-person documentary horror - Lovely Molly is for the most part a spooky old fashioned psyche-out horror film - but it's a nice touch in a film filled with them.

Molly and new husband Tim (Gretchen Lodge and Johnny Lewis) are ripped from sleep in their new inherited home by a squalling alarm. Someone has opened their back door and is thumping around in the kitchen, but police find nothing out of the ordinary and chalk it up to the wind despite Tim's insistence that he locked the door.

He's a truck driver, and is away from home for stretches of time in which Molly is left alone to deal with a growing malignancy, a presence in the house that manifests itself as sung voices, crying children, clomping horse hooves and slamming doors. Molly's afraid to reach out to her sister or husband for help, fearing that they'll assume she's lapsed back into substance abuse. She instead begins to videotape her encounters, and it's this footage, as well as taped footage of someone stalking neighbours and visiting an odd underground shrine of some sort, that forms the frightening backbone of the film.

As Sánchez himself claimed in a post-screening q&a, the film is as much an "indie relationship" film and "actor's piece" as horror film. The entire weight of the film is on newcomer Lodge's back and she pulls the whole thing off dazzlingly well, transforming from a slight, trembling girl into a stalking, haunted and threatening woman crawling through an empty house. It's a performance good enough, combined with Sánchez's legitimate gift for crafting arresting moments of weird, totemic and animalistic horror, to transcend the film's kind of tired "is it a ghost or a hallucination" set-up, and take the whole thing into straight-up spooky, straight-up original territory.

A newly-wed couple move to a new home. This place was the childhood house of the wife, Molly. She experienced some trauma there as a child. Immediately on arrival strange frightening things begin to occur. As a recovering heroin addict, the terrifying events are put down by some to be the result of her returning to drugs. Her husband is mostly away from home because of his work, leaving Molly on her own. She films many things on a hand-held camera.

The latest film from Eduardo Sánchez, one of the co-directors of The Blair Witch Project, is a different kind of horror film from that one but with similarities. The film opens á la Blair Witch with a close up of a woman who is filming herself; she is in terror for reasons not yet understood. The videotaped material which appears throughout is generally a clear nod to that famous film. But that's where the similarities end, as Lovely Molly is a much more traditional supernatural horror movie. It's one of those films where the set-up allows for several possible answers to the unknown terror. Is the source of Molly's trauma the supernatural? Her inner demons? Is it drug-induced? By the end of the movie there are answers of sorts, although there remains an enigmatic quality. The audience are allowed to piece things together themselves. It's one of those pictures that you want to watch again after a first viewing to try to put together all the pieces of the puzzle.

Gretchen Lodge is excellent in the central role. It's a part which demands some emotionally fraught moments. Lovely Molly is all about the central character, most of everything is told from her perspective. Another significant contributing factor is the soundtrack. It's very eerie but it isn't typical horror music. The score is by the band Tortoise who are one of the pioneers of post-rock. The atmospherics they help create are pretty significant here; discordant humming and threatening sounds. Add to this the little weird details such as the horses' heads, the disconnected scenes of the neighbouring family or the weird shrine in the cellar. There are a lot of things to spook you out.

This has to go down as an excellent return to the horror genre by Sánchez. It has a good balance of suspense, mystery, weirdness and dramatics to ensure that Lovely Molly is one of the more interesting horror efforts of late.