TokyoGyaru

The women have good chemistry, and I understand establishing the characters, but they're not particularly interesting or charismatic enough to spend so much time messing about with. Also, the weird, random supernatural types of moments are misplaced and don't fit the realistic tone of the film. And, no, they don't set up the U. K. ending (the better ending) well. They're just weird and poorly executed.

They could have had the very first scene and its outcome, then jumped into a scene of them heading into the cave and showed their catching up and bonding that way. The way things are, there's a lot of time-wasting. So, either change it that way or make it more interesting, because the film isn't at all interesting until they're in the cave.

So, I'm sure many reviews on here have extolled the quality of the short videos within this movie, one of which you get as a cold open. They're great, legitimately disturbing, all the way down to the music/sound design.

The other good thing is that Ethan Hawke is generally not going to sleep-walk through a role. He did what he needed to do with what he was given. Fine.

The wife character was okay, but my goodness does her voice grate when she's whine-yelling at her husband. I get her perspective, yes, but their big argument was sonically difficult to listen to, especially because his own voice was cracking.

Deputy So and So was surprisingly endearing. He's not interesting enough to build a movie around, though -- but I digress.

However, this film is not one iota scary, and any attempts at making it so fall completely flat. The blasting music/ stingers suddenly to startle the audience is annoying. The terrible CGI/makeup/character design were underwhelming. And the ghost or whatever TF that guy was (even his name is too ridiculous to type -- the real or the nickname) was stupid. Just stupid. The child performances are bad too. The stuff with the son was unnecessary red herring.

Anyway, this could have gone from a merely entertaining film (only the parts that were focused on Ethan Hawke were any good or had any depth) to a quite good one if it had kept the investigation/washed-up author aspect and dumped the boogieman. The outcome could have still been quite similar but stronger.

Rewatching this film years later makes me think of some people's reactions to "LONGLEGS." You think of how easy it would have been to fix the story if you'd eliminated the supernatural element that isn't even scary and comes across as goofy.