The House on Mansfield Street

I actually don't understand the hate for this film, granted it wasn't amazing but it kept my interest for the whole time. The main actor was OK, the woman not so good and they seemed really awkward and unnatural together, but not the worst acting I've ever seen. I do like British horror though so maybe I'm biased. Don't know what else to say really but I have to add more characters before it will let me save this review which is irritating. Apparently this was made on a 500 quid budget which actually made me up my rating from a 6 to a 7. Some creepy bits in it and worth a watch if you have Prime and don't want to pay for a British found footage.

With my having a lust for these types of films and rapidly running out of them on netflick or amazonprime, I am eager to watch what ever comes out. This one had the audacity to be British.

the one thing I love above all else in these types of films is subtlety. It's even better if it's so subtle as to leave it into question as to whether the events are even paranormal. my absolute favorite of this genre is "Leaving DC", also on amazonprime, in which the sole interactions at the start amount to little more than the sounds of someone chopping wood before escalating ever so slightly over time.

this film almost blows its load rather early, with a rather clear-cut revelation on film early on that threatens to remove all the subtlety of the "haunting". Thankfully the film moves on from it with more toned down occurrences, but it remains a glaring event that makes it pretty clear even in-universe what is happening despite the protagonist's attempts to just ignore it.

From there, it goes on with its usual game of footsteps and setting off motion-activated cameras, with only one major deviation from this. The mood was right and the protagonist was not thoroughly unlikeable and so this was becoming fun to watch.

when it came time to end, it lost all its subtlety and mystique, going for a hackneyed ending marked by a plot twist that they themselves spoiled like 3 scenes earlier.

Slow. The film equivalent of watching paint dry. "There's that noise again", Ya don't say. I appreciate what the filmmakers tried to to with basically no budget but the end result is predictable and bland. Pass this "house" up.

-2 Boring but short thankfully.

-1 Ending is no payoff. Story is silly and not original at all.

THE HOUSE ON MANSFIELD tells a simple story: Nick has just moved to the Nottingham/Sherwood area and soon after he begins to increasingly notice strange phenomena in his cottage. Might his neighbor Emma have something to do with this?

Fans of slow-burn found footage movies might actually like this. But essentially remaking PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007) failed to impress me. There was a bit of innovation with the extensive use of split screens, but because they were not used for any discernible purpose, it fell flat. Cinematic devices are only effective if they are used in the service of a well-chosen purpose.

To give an example, one effective use of the split screen could have been to increase the creep factor: say, he is investigating noises, and one split screen shows what he sees and the other shows his face. The next moment, the first split screen shows something that captures his and our attention in front of him, while the other split screen shows a threat slowly approaching him from behind. We see it, but he doesn't. This would be the found footage version of the trope of approaching danger missed by the unaware character.

This is a slow-paced movie, and especially in the first half, the pace is glacial. The second half picks up a little, but not much. The protagonist is so dismissive of the obvious paranormal events which he not only witnesses but actually records on his camera that it starts to become annoyingly unrealistic. Most people would freak out way before he does. He also seems strangely passive in the face of an increasingly menacing threat. As a character, he is drawn neither realistically nor well.

Another shortcoming to me was that the story did not even use any local legend; I would have thought that the area, famous for Robin Hood and medieval history, would have been a rich source, and these could have helped, for example, with building atmosphere and making sense out of why the events in the movie occur.

There is a small twist at the very end, but it leaves you pretty much just as baffled as before. Without a mythology, explanation, rhyme or reason, it is very hard to make a good or at least satisfying found footage horror movie.

The director evidently created a series of these "Haunted in Sherwood" movies, which I have not seen. By cross-referencing them to each other, he could build up a universe with its own mythology, and thereby avoid one substantial lack of this movie.