Of course I had never even heard about this 2024 Russian horror movie "Otrazhenie Tmy" (aka "Succubus") prior to sitting down to watching it. I happened to come across the movie by random chance, and given my love of all things horror, of course I opted to watch it without knowing what I was in for.
The storyline in the movie was rubbish. There was way too much focus on showing off nudity and sexual scenes. Sure, I get that a succubus is a seductress, but it was just laughable here. It felt like the storyline was written by a randy teenager with way too much hormones in his system. So writers Oleg Kurochkin and Dmitriy Zhigalov failed to conjure up a script and storyline that provided much entertainment for me. It was a slow paced and rather pointless narrative.
Given by extremely limited exposure to Russian cinema, then of course I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie. Despite the fact that the storyline was rubbish, then the acting performances were actually fair.
For a horror movie, then "Otrazhenie Tmy" was a swing and a miss, it was unnecessarily sleazed up by the pointless nudity and sex scenes, and it wasn't a particularly scary movie in general.
There were a couple of interesting visual scenes, but it was nowhere enough to make it up for all the shortcomings of the movie.
"Otrazhenie Tmy" came and went without leaving a lasting expression on me, and it is definitely not a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time. Nor is it a horror movie that I would recommend to horror fans.
My rating of director Serik Beyseu's 2024 horror movie lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.
