Starring: Halle Berry, Percy Daggs IV, Anthony B Jenkins
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 101 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A family that has been haunted by an evil spirit for years. However, one of the children begins to question if the evil is real.
French-born director, Alexandra Aja, made an impact with his French horror film, High Tension, in 2003. With a strong reputation for successful horror films, he has worked mainly in the US, with remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and Piranha 3D.
Which means that his fans and horror audiences were expecting some more high tension. But rather than the usual horror movie, this film is better described as a ‘terror’ film. The characters experience a sense of menace and uncertainty, imminent unknown threats, and the audience shares in this unease.
This happens in the first part of the film, slowly building up the tension (far too slow for those who want immediate gory horror moments of which there are comparatively few here). The mother and her two children are isolated in the woods for years, with her telling them that evil has entered the whole world and destroyed it. The whole world is now them, their family bonding, love, surviving, and an incantation to reassure that evil has not overtaken them, going out the house connected with long ropes for mutual security, and the continual reminder to ‘never let go’.
The mother (Momma) is played by veteran Berry and the performances of the two boys, Jenkins as Sam and Daggs IV as Nolan, are remarkable.
Momma has frequent hallucinations, her dead mother, confrontations with her dead husband, reminding the boys that all these are in their imagination, not real.
Where is this leading? The last part of the film moves into action. We see the family starving in winter, the desperate threat to kill the family dog even though he was their protector in the past. Nolan is upset, confronting his mother with his moments of doubt about the evil and its presence, wondering about the real world.
The screenplay introduces a hiker whom Nolan confronts. He wonders whether he is real or a hallucination, Sam is sceptical, but this intrusion into their world leads to a dramatic crisis, the testing of the two boys, the reappearance of their mother, more hallucinations . . .
Given the premise, the first half building up the atmosphere of the family and the tension, the final dramatic confrontations and resolution indicate that, of its kind (emphasising once again that this is really not a horror film and expectations that it is are misleading) it is a satisfyingly menacing and terror-inducing drama.
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