The Pond

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.