I stay away from online trailers and reviews before seeing a movie. I like the trailers in the theater and that's how I decide what I'm probably going to see. This one intrigued me and I couldn't avoid a blurb that said it was actually scary. That sold me.
The movie is about a pair of podcasters who do a show about the paranormal. Evy is the sceptic, Justin (voice only) is the believer. Yup. Got a Scully and Mulder thing going on here without the sexual tension aspect. It seems to be popular enough because they get fan mail and have been doing it for a while. Justin is in London so that means they record it at 3am her time.
During pre-show talk Justin brings up a different situation where someone who seems to be an influencer did something that because viral where a bunch of people cut off their ears and mailed them to her before killing themselves. Evy brings up the site to mess with him and it's a disturbing image of a screaming woman on a red background with a sound playing. She leaves it up long enough for him to yell at her to stop.
Evy lives with her mother and is her mother's caretaker. Her mom is end of life. She's tucked away in her bedroom, under smooth sheets and blankets. She's just lying there, breathing. The house is full of religious trappings and I do mean full of them. Lots of pictures, crucifixes, candles, statues, etc. They're in pretty much every shot in the movie.
Justin gets an email with ten audio clips from a random letter email address and some cryptic words. Being who they are they decide to play them and discuss.
The movie does suspense well. They stay away from the tropes and there isn't a single jump scare in the whole thing even though they set it up to think there will be. They do have images in the background as needed and they're indistinct enough to make them creepier than if they were shown. The sound was incredibly done where it's mixing the sound from the clips to the sound in the house. Cinematography had framing so well done it was both unnoticed and right in your face. Technically I'd like to say this film should be up for minor to mid-level awards.
As they listen to the clips things get progressively unhinged in what they're listening to. What went from simple proof that the woman talks in her sleep turns into more and more unexplained things. Evy also starts experiencing unexplained things that involve her and her mother.
The plot settles onto demonic possession and a relatively obscure demon who has a problem with babies, causing miscarriages, stillbirths, and mothers doing unspeakable things to their babies. Just before that starts being involved Evy finds out she's pregnant.
This is where the oddness happens from a viewer standpoint. She calls her doctor to schedule a pregnancy test instead of going to the dollar store and getting a test. The doctor calls back just before they start a 3am taping to tell her she's six weeks pregnant. Then the next clip they listen to has a baby crying.
Evy keeps finding things out of place. A statue shows up on her mother's bedside table and shows up again after she put it in a drawer. A painting over her mother's bed is askew. She finds her mother out of bed after she's gone out for an evening/night even though mom is in an end of life coma. We see her mother move in the background when something odd is happening to Evy.
The reason I bring up the sound is that it's so well mixed. When they're listening to banging on the walls in a clip the sound is on the right side of the theater. Then there's an occasional one on the left before going back to the right. It's a way to try to figure out if it's all in the clip or if there's stuff happening in the house. Evy notices something's wrong but doesn't know what.
The audio clips start Justin down the path of old nursery rhymes, what they meant, and that there may be hidden meanings if played backwards. Yup. The classic "play them backwards for the real meaning" thing. She doesn't hear anything in them, he does. Considering the movie opens with her singing a nursery rhyme to her mother it ties in well.
There's the obligatory flickering lights that Evy does not wisely unplug, given that she's living in an older house and flickering lights tend to be a sign of A Bad Think Happening with the Electricity. That bothered me as a bit of a lack of real world impact. Lights do turn off and on at crucial moments, like during a clip when something is said. It's overall building the suspense.
Evy is doodling with crayons. She took them out of the drawer in her mother's nightstand when she put the statue in there the first time and you can see a kind of disturbing drawing in black and red crayon. Her doodles are getting more elaborate as time progresses.
Jeremy doesn't want to listen to the last two clips. He's tried to answer the email but the address was deleted. He's done research and found out that the name of the aforementioned demon is in the email address (backwards) and that they are hearing it more and more in the clips. The voice of reason is overridden and they seem to have a regular live broadcast when people call in.
The callers are all about the people in the clips. The first caller says they're from the same city Evy lives in, brings up how the house was full of drawings of dead children on the walls, and they were both dead at the bottom of the stairs. The next caller seems to be trying to warn them not to listen to any more of the clips but static cuts him off. The next one describes a horrific child murder but doesn't have any useful details like when or where. The last caller is talking about how she's a horrible mother and sounds like she's going to drown her child.
The two of them work hard to convince her not to do it. Evy kind of breaks here and says she killed her mother but it's more of her not praying with her than an active role. This is where the movie breaks down.
The sound is loud enough that it's difficult to hear the various things happening at the end. The visuals are chaotic enough that it's difficult to see important things but they do show just enough of some of them, I will say that. With those two mixed up it's tough to follow the last few minutes.
Evy's house is going nuts. The TV has the image from that viral thing and she can't turn it off. It turns out it isn't even plugged in. The light bulbs are popping all over the house. As she turns you can see black and red crayon drawings over all the walls. The table where she sat while recording her podcast is covered in drawings, especially one that's multiple pages. There's flashes of faces in plastic bags. When she goes up to check on her mother the bed is empty, neatly made, and the statue she kept moving is in the middle. The last thing we get to see is her mother walking towards her from the bathroom behind her. The last thing we hear are screams and thumps.
And this is where it ends.
We get no closure. This is the same thing that happened with "Iron Lung". All buildup, no payoff. Leaving the ending to the audience's imagination is a cop out to me. I did not spend all that time getting invested in the movie only for them to pull the rug out from under me at the end.
There's a lot of different interpretations of the ending on the internet. Go figure. I'm going to get past my dislike for the concept to give some thoughts on it myself.
The audio clips seemed to match Evy's descent into whatever the heck she descended into. They paired up with events in her home and in her own life. There's an interesting bit early on where there's an off-camera voice telling her how to tell when her mother is finally dying. One reviewer noted that the signs the voice gave actually happened at the beginning of the movie and all the scenes with her mother were either in her head or the demonic entity animating her - take your pick.
The last scenes we have are the house in total disarray and not at all what we'd seen until that point. The laptop is buried under papers when the last time she was "normal" she was using it. The kitchen has the table and chairs on the ceiling rather than the floor. The walls, which were fine until now, were now covered in those drawings. There was .. something smeared on the kitchen counters. Someone mentioned there was a creepy baby or doll on top of the refrigerator. All the cabinet doors are open. The only tidy space was her mother's room.
So yeah. Go with whatever ending you want since they weren't strong enough to give us one on their own. I still consider that lazy writing. They spent all that time doing a great job building suspense and then lost it when they ended the movie on ambiguity.
If you like suspense, go ahead and see it. That's well done indeed. If you want a full movie with an ending, you may want to skip it. I will admit to tensing up as things progressed because they were so well into building suspense without releasing it in things like jump scares and big plot drops. It wasn't interesting enough for me to go to see it again and find all the key points where the audio clips may have meshed with what was going on with Evy.
We never do know what happens to Jeremy, if anything. He sounds distressed but it's so late in the movie there's no way to tell if it's really him or in her head. So we don't get closure with him either. Another annoyance for me.
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