The Pact

A woman's mother dies. She calls the rebellious younger sister to see if she will attend the funeral. She then chats with her daughter who lives with her cousin. During the chat the daughter asks her who's behind her. She sees no one but looks around the house. Then she vanishes.

During the funeral the little sister, Annie, does show up. The daughter and the cousin are there and spend the night at the house. Next morning the cousin has vanished.

Annie goes to the police. One night some force grabs her and yanks her throughout the house. Annie does some digging. There's a picture of her mom and a woman in a park. She also has visions of this woman.

When the cop visits her house they discover a secret room with holes in the walls to observe everyone else in the house. When the cop returns to the house by himself he's stabbed to death.

Annie meanwhile has a medium come over who experiences things. As she leaves she utters the name Judas. Annie discovers there was a serial killer in the area years ago who was known as Judas. He killed the woman she sees in the visions. Annie goes to the park and is led to a church/school where her mean mom worked. She finds out a man worked also there who has their same last name. He was a brother of the mother no one knew about. The medium tells her to do a Ouija session. It provides her with more answers and Annie will confront the evil in the house.

The Pact is a well-done lower budget horror thriller. Why it's called "The Pact" is entirely unclear. It's a slower movie but it's effective. Music and effects are very good and you do want to find out just what is going on. The story combines human evil with the supernatural in a convincing way. It could easily have chosen either of those but together they make things more interesting. Direction is excellent and the cast does a solid job as well. My main complaint is the casting of Caity Lotz as the main character. They already hired better choices in the lovely Kathleen Rose Perkins and Agnes Bruckner. The story is a bit short as we learn next to nothing of our main character or the family.

As a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother's death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home.

First, let me praise Casper VanDien, who (to put it bluntly) did not suck. I cannot say he is particularly known for his superb acting, having done a number of cheesy movies, but VanDien shows off his acting chops here. This kind of performance could get you a supporting actor Oscar if it was not in a horror film.

I heard the judges at Sundance were praising Nick McCarthy's direction, and that is absolutely fair. Above all else, the camera is the star here. Maybe we should give that credit to the cinematographer (Bridger Nielson), but it is hard to draw that line -- could one have been great without the other? Alan Bacchus said that the film was "smart, well written and genuinely scary". He is right on all three counts. I rarely find horror films scary (I am immune to their nonsense), but I actually had to peek through my fingers at one point. I am embarrassed to say it, but this is true. Well done!

Just for clarification, I started to see this movie on a Saturday night, almost asleep and exhausted so, you can pretty much see that my expectations were not so high, in fact, The Pact started slow and I was almost done for in the first minutes.

But, even when the premise was done and re-done a thousand times, the movie somewhat got my attention, enough to watch it till the end.

The pact focus on 3 sisters that got a bad deal in their childhood due to an abusive mother, so, the movie start with them and slowly develops into a one-girl deal. Almost the entire movie is focused on Annie, acted by the beautiful Caity Lotz, one of the sisters in search of the truth about their past. This could be somewhat a mistake if the movie didn't knew how to handle the situation, but, in this case, having only one primary character and almost no development of other characters makes the movie more interesting since she does a beautiful job on screen. Make no mistake, this is not a dialog movie, the majority of scenes happens in silence, which is great since the objective is to capture the look and feel of our main character and I must say that it worked, at least for me.

The storyline is incredible simple but contrary to other movies that fail miserably, in this one it works and works because the movie relies on images more than anything.

It's not a perfect movie for it had it's flaws but the result gave a positive outcome to all this, plus Caity Lotz is gorgeous on this movie, a nice and fresh look to see on screen.

The Pact is a movie undecided of it's genre, a mix of suspense/horror with paranormal and thriller... The Pact does contain a little piece of each genre and does avoid the obvious clichés which is a nice welcome.

Balanced acting, a lot of suspense, almost no horror and some paranormal into the mix makes this movie somewhat a nice touch for a Saturday night if your expectations are not high, I will still watch it once more just to see Caity Lotz :)

Is not a bad movie and definitely not the disaster the other reviewers say it is, there are a tons of movies 10 times more expensive than this one with worse outcome so I can pretty much assure you... This is better than average.

Okay, sure, it's not a groundbreaking horror film (what is nowadays?), but I found myself enjoying it. I usually don't watch films below a 6.0 IMDb rating (yeah, yeah, I'm a ratings wh***, shut up). But I was really in the mood for a horror movie and decided to give this a try. Yeah, it's a traditional story and somewhat predictable, but the modern "offbeat" characters kept it interesting. I agree with the user that says it starts off a bit weak/slow, but the rest of the story kept me intrigued. I've seen (modern) horror movies that are far worse than this that have higher ratings so give it a try if you enjoy modern horror.

It's a low budget horror movie, but not cheesy in the least. There is no cheesy fake blood and gore, no sex crazed teenagers, and no topples bubble headed blond's running from a psycho killer.

No cheap thrills here, just a very complex and layered plot with plenty of twist and turns. The movie never once lost my attention nor did I ever get lost in the plot. The movie moved slow enough to build likable characters and to build up suspense, but also wasn't so slow that it lost my interest.

I loved watching Annie as she went through the motions of loss and anger and then fear, and then ultimately the courage to discover clues and dig up old family secrets.