The Voice of the Lion opens with a man making a phone to someone we soon learn is a priest. The caller is clearly distressed, tired and frightened – with pentagrams and candles all over the floor. Now on a FaceTime call with the priest, the man's arms begin to burn with symbols and the priest quickly turns to the man's young daughter to help with an over-the-phone exorcism.
This short film will feel reasonably familiar because essentially it is a found-footage horror movie that uses the first-person perspective and hand-held cinematography as one of the tools to draw the viewer in. In this case it is not so much footage as a live feed since the film was made using a mobile phone. The narrative device is good and although some of the plotting doesn't totally scan, it does grab you. The hand-held approach is perhaps a bit overdone and it would have been good to have a bit more stability to the camera view, but for key moments it does so. Make-up and atmosphere are well presented so the horror is visually evident but it does also feel tense, with a very good build throughout. The conclusion is sudden and satisfying and I particularly enjoyed the dark tone to the ending while a much more jovial song played.
It does feel a little derivative in some ways, but it is short and it does work for what it wants to do, which is really the key thing.
