The Faith Community

In a market oversaturated with horror films The Faith Community gives us a unique twist on the found footage sub-genre. Shot only with one camera, like a regular civilian with a hand held camera would be able to capture the unfolding events and presented without music this film is surprisingly effective and suspenseful. Proof that a good story doesn't depend on all of Hollywood's bells and whistles - well worth the watch!

The nicest thing I could say about Faith Community, the newest found footage "horror" to come along our way, is that at its core it has a fairly neat idea that touches on both people's willingness to be led by potentially dangerous religious zealots and the dangers of visiting a cult.

When it comes to niceties however, that's about as far as it can go with Faith R Johnson's film.

Filmed over a couple of days on a miniscule budget, Faith Community is student film like in its rough and raw nature, there's little to no character exposition, some scenes play out far too long while others barely have time to breathe and the film is one of the most shockingly shot I've seen in some time.

For a film that runs long at 90 minutes, there's a large portion of screen time where you will be either watching something out of focus, starring at such fascinating objects like sticks on the ground or someone's hands and while with any POV or found footage horror you expect things to have a home movie type of feel, Faith Community takes this aspect to a whole new level and makes a number of key scenes borderline unwatchable.

The plot of the film also begins to blur into a quick-fire procession of unbelievable events and before you even get to sit around the campfire of "The Messenger's" weird little cult camp things start going haywire rapidly fast, giving us very little time to even gather our thoughts or time for us to begin to care about what is about to happen to our group of college students out to investigate a way to get closer to God.

Faith Community's terrible execution and undercooked narrative works against its cast almost from the beginning and you get the sense had the material been a little stronger, its performers like Jeremy Harris as cult leader The Messenger and Jeffrey Brabant as cameraman Colin may've been able to save the film slightly with their committed and sometimes on-point turns deserving of a stronger film.

Final Say –

Devoid of scares or thrills and with only a few minor chills, Faith Community is a truly amateurish production that squanders a potentially engaging plot line and instead delivers an extremely unpolished experience that you'd do best to avoid.

1 barrel of water out of 5

I get that they tried a home video camera aspect. Still sad for a 2017 film. The concept wasn't bad, but the filming art was... not good lol. This concept will be redone better. I get that this kind of filming is hard, but you have to meet the watcher half way 👎🏼

As a former Christian fundamentalist I was looking forward to this.... all I can say is that it is what an immature and unworldly person would imagine are the thoughts of fundamentalists without any nuance or authenticity. It's almost as if the writer has never experienced people with these beliefs and simply imagined how they would behave after a quick google search of some radical beliefs. The acting was terrible, but it's hard to tell whether the acting or the script was worse. There are so many odd and uncomfortable things that people with extreme beliefs do and say that is very odd... it was surprising that this film didn't draw from any of it, but rather in an attempt to exaggerate the craziness, became unbelievable. I wondered a few times if it was a dark comedy/ satire because of how silly it was. For example, the military character. Was he improvising his details? It was factually inconsistent, exaggerated and ultimately inaccurate. Even a quick google search about military jobs and complications (like the psychosis described) would have made this depiction more believable. I can't believe an amateur film like this is on Amazon. This was so bad that I still think it might be a joke.

The movie could have been good. This is a good premise for a found footage horror. Yes it's not original but it could've been creepy. But nothing really happens. Like, nothing. Where you think it's gonna hit the fan it doesn't and then it tanks and I found myself repeatedly going back to my phone because I was bored. Which isn't good