“You'd be surprised at the things you find when you go looking...”” – Dr. Powell

First, if anyone enjoyed the vibe of this film, I highly recommend the music video for Fantasy by DyE.

I appreciated a lot about this film, but felt like it didn’t fully live up to it’s potential. And that goes for pretty much every aspect of the film. For everything that I felt like they did really well, there was something related that just fell short.

To start with the good, I really loved some of the visual imagery. The look of the cloaked cultists was perfect to me, and was eerie and off without being too over the top, obvious, or cliché. Although it didn’t always work, I enjoyed the clear inspirations that I saw from Carpenter’s Thing, both visually and in terms of paranoia, and some Hellraiser in the design of the creatures. I also really appreciated that at least at first, we were all gas and no breaks. I think from the start of the film until Mitchell and Allison split ways is incredibly well paced, with every scene demanding the next one. I also appreciated how spartan a lot of the exposition was, and how much was at times left to the audience to infer instead of having told to them. The pair of Vincent and Simon epitomize this, with almost their entire backstory being completely non-verbal. I also thought some of the acting was really standout. Ellen Wong’s performance was easily the standout, and I was happy that she made it out.

For the bad, I thought the pacing seriously began to falter in the second half. Once they were surrounded by the failed experiments all tension with the creatures themselves dissipated and it felt like we were quickly touring the sites of a mid-grade haunted house. Likewise, it felt like there was very little tension when the big daughter creature made its appearance. I think part of this was how the creature was filmed, we saw too much of it and in too many direct shots. I can understand wanting to show off the effects and design, but it again made it feel cheap and unthreatening. I think the biggest negative to how quickly things start is that we get very little time to really like or relate to the characters. I think Ellen Wong did a great job with her few scenes at the beginning to really give you a sense of who her character was, and that memorable personality made me root for her throughout the rest of the film. Like you had a sense of who she was, interested in the “gross” stuff of being a nurse or at least to the extent to weird out patients for kicks, but immature and not very good at the actual work of nursing. Compare that to the little we get about the cop, the doctor, the meth head. There’s virtually nothing I can tell you about any of those characters that isn’t directly related to their function in the story. I don’t know anything really about them besides their plot relevance and their job. To be fair, I actually thought the state trooper did a good job too in this regard in the one real scene he gets before he’s killed. I think this also relates to another problem that I had with the film where the actions of the characters seem to often swing wildly. Why did the pregnant girl turn from being scared to a thrall of the doctor and then back again? Why did the doctor abduct Allison when it really had nothing to do with his goals or desires. Why did he even care what Mitchel did or believed? Sadly all of these actions just kind of came across as half baked, and I think that’s because we never really got a sense of who these characters were.

Overall, I appreciated and saw the films ambition and there are far worse cinematic sins than a film’s reach exceeding its grasp.