Ok we are in the home stretch now. Only a couple more days until we get to the end of this exercise and put another Halloween season behind us. I did go back to the list tonight and Netflix has really been delivering while my list is dwindling so I decided to fire up this 2021 horror flick. The cover art was on point and I even decided to check out the trailer just to make sure. Not that every day, even at the end is going to be a winner, but I wanted to try and make sure I did my best to go out with a bang. Thankfully I will say there’s a lot that this movie does well and only has a few drawbacks that I didn’t really care for in the end. So lets jump into it all.
My favorite thing about this movie is they really did the creepy right. All throughout this movie the negative space was ripe with haunting images and ghosts that were there in one shot and gone the next. They really built up a good healthy tolerance for terrifying instances of look or you’ll miss it. The main protagonist, Ambar, moves into a boarding house after fleeing Mexico following her mother’s untimely demise. She lands in a frigid Cleveland with not a lot of prospect to her name. Trying desperately to make a way in the world for herself she takes a relatively crappy job being paid under the table and moves into a super sketchy old house with a landlord you’d normally abhor. But she doesn’t have a lot of options so she takes what she can get. For the first half of the movie we get to spend a great deal of time engaging a great number of illusions that Amber sees and some she doesn’t. On top of that we fall prey to a handful of chilling dream sequences that we don’t realize are just that until some well timed jump scares. The film does a really great job of balancing out the creepy as well. It’s not simply the imagery but the overall tone of the film. There’s a real desperation emanating off of the boarding house in general that doesn’t give a very peaceful vibe as is. Much of what happens inside the house you are trying to figure out if it’s real or imagination. And the way they utilize the background and the dark space to hide all manner of ghosts and goblins is fantastic. There were many scenes I went back and rewound through just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Because some of them are blink and you will. But that payoff is so great.
The movement is key here too. The way the specters operate in either engaging directly only to find out at the last moment that it’s not truly there is done so well. Combined with the invisible movements balanced with the visible. There are a number of times we have to use our other senses to interpret the spatial reasoning and direction that certain entities flow in and out of a scene. Jumping in and out of visibility just adds to the presentation in some really meaningful ways. This also really serves as a great way of just further weighing down Ambar mentally and emotionally as she’s trying her best just to survive. Things keep going wrong and she’s treading imaginary water in life trying to keep the illusion going while simultaneously being victim to real life illusions that rob her of sleep and rest and composure. With everything feeding into her mounting problems in life, the tension just continues to build. It’s this palpable kind of uneasiness that exacerbates the audience and puts you in the shoes of Ambar as she’s trying desperately to keep everything together. Dancing around the edge of cutting and running she’s too dependent on recovering any kind of financial stability that ultimately preludes her struggles in the finale to even stay alive. This is where the composure of the scares interlaced with the emotional tone of the movie come together really well and keeps the audience in a sort of fugue state where they don’t know what is real and what is not.
Ok so now that I’ve filled that praise balloon all the way up, let’s pop it pretty harshly to bring things back down to reality. My biggest problem with the movie is that Ambar is just not likable through a lot of the movie. I feel bad for her at times but she’s supposed to be the means by which I stay smack dab in the chaos and when I can’t connect with her because she’s pissing me off, it takes me back out of the movie. I know she’s new and I know she’s inexperienced but if I can’t hang on to her hand as we walk through the plot of this movie, I have no guide and I’m just a participant on the outside looking in which does me no good. I need to be in the mix of what’s going on in this movie. I need to be front and center. When danger is looming right behind her, I want to feel like I have to frantically look over my shoulder, terrified if I’ll be met with a pair of glowing eyes as well or not. But when she’s just a dumbass doing stupid things that make me want to smack her, I’m back on the outside. And there were a number of times I felt like I was on the outside simply because I didn’t like her in a scene or was upset with a choice her character made that seemed unnecessarily stupid. It’s one of those things where it’s a tightrope walk to balance trying to think of what you’d do in that particular situation. I know she was stressed. I know she was frustrated. But don’t give all your money to someone you just met at a crappy, paid under the table kind of job because she told you she could get your forged papers. Don’t be that dumb. I know she can’t REALLY cut and run or there is no movie. But if I’m not at that same desperation level with her because she’s upset me already then I don’t know why she gets in the car with the creepy landlord and goes back to a house she’s already escaped once. We can get to that desperation but I need to feel it with her and get there organically. That wasn’t the case.
When it comes to grading this movie I really want to give it a B. Maybe a B-. I know I can’t own this movie because it’s a Netflix movie. But I’m not sure if that’s just my cheap way of getting around wanting to give this movie a B while knowing I can’t actually own it outside of a bootleg. And in all transparency, I do own some Netflix bootlegs. If they presented them for purchase I’d gladly buy the original. And I have a paid subscription to Netflix I pay for every month. So I have no qualms about my bootlegs just because i like the idea of owning an actual copy. I don’t have a lot of them. Maybe 3 or 4. But if I were to really give this movie a B, I’d be saying that I’d be willing to purchase it on home media and I don’t really know if that’s the case. There’s a good number of things this movie does really well that I really liked. And I wouldn’t say that too many of the things it did poorly really ruined the movie. But I think its the fact that so often I found the main character of the film really just unlikable that it bothered me quite a bit. I’d probably watch the movie again. And I don’t know that’d I’d really have a hard time with it sitting on the shelf like so many of the other movies in the collection. But even sitting here now I wonder if it’s one that I do truly think I’ll revisit. I could probably see watching this one with someone else. I could fire this one up with a group of people to enjoy it again with a larger audience. That I could very realistically see. I think just an on my own viewing again for my own personal enjoyment does not seem likely. So I think I’ve got a bit of a toss up between a C+ and a B-. If I had to say I’m leaning one way or the other, it’s probably towards the C+. I still think that’s a fair grade. It might be a little harsh for the visuals that they really do well in the first half of the movie. There’s so many great creepy sequences that I really enjoyed. They were set up and executed really well with the space in many shots being used superbly. So it could be one of those things that somewhere down the road I do actually revisit this movie and maybe it gets up into the B level territory. But for now lets err on the side of caution and give it a solid C+. I think that’s just about all I really have to say about this flick right now. I do recommend a watch for sure. It’s got some solid scares and is a great little flick you can check out this Halloween season pretty easily. But on that note, it’s time to go childrens. Until our next adventure, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
