The Pond

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.

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.

A man starts hallucinating sinister images involving his family and the locals.

I didn't like this movie. The acting is really bad but the visuals are good. It's a very aesthetically pleasing film. Although it does do things that so many other movies have done like the creepy animal masks, that trope has been done to death lately, I just saw this in another movie that came out this year. The story is mildly interesting, but by the end i didn't really care. Again the imagery is really nice. I don't want to say it's all style but no substance, I think that harsh, I just didn't like the story or how it was executed and the subpar acting didn't help either.

There were two moments in this movie that I simply adored and I did everything possible in order to hang onto them in order to make this movie better than it actually is. But in the end, it comes off as pretentious and not as elegant as it might hope to be.

Sure, some scenes manage to pull you out of the boredom, even get you invested in the movie, but it is not something that one would easily appreciate, just look at the comments, the reviews online, people called it too much style over substance because it is, tried to be too smart for its own good and managed to get itself stuck in a bad place. Also, this is a psychological movie, not a horror, it doesn't explore the murder section at all, but believe me, it is a good thing, a better thing, yet it still doesn't manage to bring any kind of satisfaction. If you were to compare it to a sugar rush, just imagine having no sugar, nor rush. Just a viewer, hoping for some crumbs to be thrown to him, but never getting any.

Cheers!

I have been enjoying a lot of indie flicks lately, but this was infuriating vapid from every perspective.

The experience of watching this was like continuing to read a book you are not enjoying.