alohaschmidt

I watched this a few nights ago and can't stop thinking about it. The film opens up with some very melodramatic music over sweeping shots of Central Park, it is so stylistically jarring for what comes next.

I am fascinated by the juxtaposition of the subject matter being so religious and yet there is quite a bit of nudity and violence that just comes out of nowhere, jarringly so and without much context.

My favorite part of the film is the apartment and the complex's residents. There is a lot of work done to make everything seem like these people and this place really exist. I almost expect that if I were to go to Brooklyn that I could run into these characters no problem.

The main character has a history of attempted suicide but it isn't delved into as to why. I don't know if that's important to the story but it seems to be thrown in the film for the sake of explaining away her later punishment by becoming a sentinel.

The cinematographic choices in this movie are odd. It is shot in a found footage style, but it feels like a film student tooling around with a camera. The film starts off with the camera outside of a car, pointed at the characters but you can't see them because of the sun glaring of the windshield. Weird.

Andre is tasked with house sitting a stranger's house and is told to document it with his hand-held camera to see if anything comes back to him because he has amnesia. This house is said to be creepy by the character and his friend but it just seems like any single dude's house complete with black leather couch and black entertainment set. It has mannequins covered in drop cloth and masks. Sort of unsettling, sure.

What ensues is a drag of the audience's patience until a weird neighbor shows up. This is the only time the whole movie anything exciting happens, the rest is a jumble of nonsense. There's a twist but it isn't a clever I didn't see that coming sort of twist. It almost seems like the ending got changed last minute and they didn't want to reshoot scenes to make things make sense.

There's a lot of drugs and drinking in this film, not a big deal to me but it would've been interesting to lean into how being intoxicated altered Andre's perception of things happening to him. He seems pretty sober as things are going on, and high for a short time. We could've seen him watching things on the camera and freaking out while high.

A family buys a house with a spring-fed pool and encounters a demon lurking beneath the depths. I found the most irritating thing about this is that the origins of the demon pool aren't explained much, just that it has taken many people over the years, as a sacrifice to making others in the family healthier. I have heard of a myth in Asian culture of a house that will allow for better health if someone different dies in the house; I thought maybe that's where the film was heading but it didn't.

I think it is interesting to make horror out of a pool, which is typically a fun place in the middle of the day but incites some inklings of terror at night, especially when the pool lights are shorting out. Very Stephen King in tapping into that weird feeling.

I found it strange that the pool is spring fed but we don't see the spring; it made me wonder if the house was spring fed or even the neighborhood. How is that divided?