GODFORSAKEN is a found footage horror movie which during its first few minutes begins like many others in terms of exposition, but then takes a sharp left turn. A woman resurrects at her own funeral, but she seems menacing and growling and then runs away. A few days later, a documentary crew arrives in town to make a film about this event, while ever stranger things keep happening in the locale.
The movie can be fairly divided into two halves: the first plays like a mystery movie, whereas the second is straight-up horror. Actually, this kind of structure is not that uncommon in the horror genre, and especially found footage horror: a "quiet" first half kind of gets us settled down before we are jolted up by the shock of the events in the second. The first movie I saw for which I became aware of this sort of dichotomous quiet-intense structure is Takashi Miike's excellent AUDITION (1999). Also, all of Eli Roth's movies follow it.
So while this kind of structure is not new, rarely has the first half of a horror movie been so nicely constructed as a mystery story. I was genuinely wondering where the movie was going with it. Once the mystery is basically cleared up, the second half begins. It turns out that it also delivers strongly on what it is supposed to do. It contains some of the most intense found footage horror sequences this side of REC (2007), which is in my opinion still the best found footage horror movie around.
Here comes now a major spoiler:
I loved the novel twist on the Zombie genre. There are probably thousands of zombie movies around, and after this story, I am left to wonder why this type of idea had not been realized before (to my knowledge). There have been occasional innovations in the Zombie genre, most prominently the "running zombies" of the RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985) franchise, which ended up being practically universally adopted. Others, like the surprisingly creepy "silent" zombies in the found footage film THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD (2018) were not widely copied. The innovation in GODFORSAKEN has to do with the religiously-themed way that townsfolk initially become victims. Why can people not come up with interesting variations on a well-worn concept more often?
Be that as it may, almost all the actors did a good job, and since most of the characters came across as likable, we care about them when they are in danger. There were some moments that strained credulity in terms of a character in severe danger who still bothers to film, but really not any more than most other found footage horror films.
My only real criticism is that the movie ends in a cliched way. Just before watching this movie, I had seen the found footage movie, M. O. M (2020), a really good take on the topic of psychopathic kids, and one of its greatest strengths was that the ending defied expectations. I suspect that a more innovative ending in GODFORSAKEN would have left the audience with a better impression of what is really a very good horror movie.
