(Just as a heads-up, this one’s going to get a little spoilery.)
Well, just when I think I should maybe be a little more generous in my assessment of found-footage films, after last week’s exemplary Gonjiam, along comes something that reminds me of just how crummy they can be. Evidence was recommended to me by a friend who described it as “not very good, but it really gets batshit as it goes along.” I appreciated the caveat going in, and my friend wasn’t wrong. This is a film that starts off in conventional territory and, as it goes along, just piles more and more and more shit on until the end is sort of a barrage of images, though the cumulative effect is more annoying than anything else. Like, if we were to talk about film in terms of having a cinematic “voice,” this movie would be a lot of incoherent yelling. I mean, it kind of is, literally, but also metaphorically.
This is the story of two couples - Ryan and Abi, and Brett and Ashley. Ryan fancies himself a filmmaker, and he plans on making a “documentary” out of an upcoming camping trip the four of them are taking. It’s not entirely clear what kind of documentary Ryan intends to make, since his entire thesis seems to be “let’s watch Brett - who hates camping - as he suffers through a weekend of camping.” You sort of get the idea that Ryan thinks owning a camcorder makes him a filmmaker, the same way that owning a notebook makes you a poet. Ryan and Brett are friends, but they have that sort of low-key antagonistic fratboy kind of friendship that seems to be mostly based on ball-busting. They’re not loathsome, at least not to start, just your garden-variety white male assholes. Abi and Ashley’s distinguishing traits are that Ashley likes musicals, and Abi is blonde.
So these are our protagonists, and they head off into the woods in an RV (which they won’t be sleeping in, but Ryan needs it to…charge his camera’s battery packs? No, it didn’t make sense to me either) for a weekend of reluctant outdoorsmanship, drinking, and filming not much of anything interesting. This is the kind of film it is: Ryan talks Abi and Ashley into making out for the camera, and they do so contingent on Ryan and Brett doing the same. We see Abi and Ashley’s kiss in lingering detail, but the camera cuts off before we can see Ryan and Brett kiss. There’s even some gratuitous, like entirely gratuitous, T&A right up front. Like other found-footage films, everyone uses their real first names for verisimilitude, and certainly the cinematic choices made by Ryan the film’s writer echo those made by the character of Ryan that he plays in the film. I have to assume they are - being actors and all - playing characters, but moments like that give me pause.
But anyway, drinking and Brett being grumpy and Ryan being a dick and Abi and Ashley sort of put up with all of it, and then comes the strange, misshapen figure they spot in a ravine.
And the feral shrieks from the deep woods, late into the night.
So yes, we have four campers being menaced by mysterious creatures in the woods around them. That’s not the totality of the film, but it does describe the most coherent part. The best way I can describe this film is perfunctory - it hits story beats because it needs or is expected to, but doesn’t really develop or contextualize them. This is one of those movies where stuff just happens, and keeps happening. Ryan takes Brett, Ashley, and Abi camping, even though Brett hates the idea of camping. Why? Because he wants to make a documentary. Why? Well, then otherwise, the filmmakers seem to think, you wouldn’t have any reason for there to be a camera out in the middle of the woods. It’s narratively flimsy. Why did they bring an RV? The RV is there so they can get trapped in it during a siege sequence. This is one of those movies where everything happens because the movie needs it to happen, not as a consequence of people’s behavior or the environment, and there’s very little attempt to make any of it plausible.
The first half isn’t all that eventful - Brett gets annoyed at Ryan repeatedly, Abi and Ashley get annoyed at Ryan, Ryan is annoying, and then things start prowling around in the woods, at which point Ryan instantly morphs out of absolutely nowhere into someone maniacally obsessed with filming everything, against all sense or reason, regardless of his friends’ well-being or safety. This film has a serious, serious problem with finding reasons for people to keep filming. Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem for the filmmakers, since they solve it with Ryan (and subsequent characters) just sort of grabbing the camera and filming, whether it makes sense in the moment or not. This film reaches the point where its characters should say “fuck filming any of this, let’s get out of here” and blows by it without even slowing down. Doesn’t even attempt to give a reason.
But, to be fair to it, it does a pretty good job of using its limited resources (this is not a film with a large budget) pretty effectively. We don’t really ever get a good look at the creatures stalking the protagonists, and that’s good because we see just enough to know that a closer look would reveal them as cheap gorilla costumes. The illusion isn’t broken, but you never forget that they’re, like, an inch away from that point at all times. We get glimpses of people who’ve been gutted and torn apart, but just glimpses, and it’s effective, but again, you also sort of know that lingering shots would have betrayed the cheapness of the practical effects. A lot of the edits in this film revolve around someone turning the camera off or pointing it away from the action when the action would be too expensive to show, and I think that’s okay - it’s realistic that average people wouldn’t hold a shot on something terrible happening, and the awkwardness and choppiness of the camerawork throughout feels appropriate.
So the filmmakers evinced some awareness of how to use what they had to work with, at least on that level. But I wonder why they didn’t pick a better premise - why not just have them camping and have someone bring a camera along? Why did it have to be a documentary? Why does Ryan go from zero to obsessed? It’s like the filmmakers saw other found-footage films and decided there were certain things they had to do, whether they made sense or not. A sketchy-looking guy with a gun comes by the campsite, looking for his dog, gets kind of tense with Ryan, and then leaves. Why? No reason, apparently. It never comes up again. For some reason, movies about people camping really like the “stranger drops by the campsite and acts menacing” thing. Again, it’s not part of a larger, organic story, just one more thing that feels like the filmmakers included it because that’s what you do in movies like this.
But then, unsatisfied with just making a film about a group of campers hunted by mysterious creatures, the second half of the film shifts focus as Abi and Ashley stumble on what is meant to be some kind of secret research facility (but is clearly just a horse farm), and the rest of the film morphs into one long sustained bout of running and yelling and bleeding as all hell breaks loose at this “facility”, and somehow the camera keeps rolling through all of it. The tension ramps up considerably at this point, driven mostly by all of the running and yelling, but whatever semblance of believability it has goes right out the window. Once military special ops types get involved, the dialogue goes from nothing special but believable to cringingly bad (to quote: “die, die, die!”) and everything sort of goes into a blender as our remaining protagonists run through one building and hallway after another as more of the creatures, and then rabid-seeming human beings acting like “fast” zombies join the party. It’s all clearly done entirely on the cheap, with realistically shaky camerawork covering the majority of sins, but it all feels pointless. We don’t have any investment in these people, there’s no tension and release, everything kind of goes by in a blur of blood and snarling faces and “Alpha team, move out!” style jargon, without any sense of revelation or discovery. It’s just a wall of images flung at us, a lot of running and yelling and more running and more yelling. And that’s…sort of it. It kind of reminds me of a store-brand take on
Cloverfield, similar beats but without any attention to the characters and a tiny fraction of the budget.
Honestly, I sort of expected it to get weirder. Maybe it’s because I’ve put films like
Possession and
Mandy into my eyeballs lately, and I’m not sure what specifically I expected. Maybe some fourth-wall breaking, or time travel, The tagline is “but did it happen?” and that made me think that at some point this was going to be revealed as all being a film in progress, only for the threat to be terribly real or something. I dunno, but “they were camping near a top-secret research facility that’s just experienced an outbreak” doesn’t exactly strain the imagination. It does read like the kind of thing someone like Ryan
would think strains the imagination, though.
There was potential here: Get rid of the documentary angle, make the threat something a little more minimal - ghostly people, perhaps, something visually striking in the dark without being too expensive to set up, and focus the footage more on a mix of the innocuous and the unsettling, shifting the proportions as the film moves on, and then pick one set of interiors (preferably not a horse farm, maybe even just a clearing somewhere that can be set-dressed to look like the site of a ritual) to source as the center of the threat, and save the majority of your effects budget for one really freaky-looking thing to be the big reveal. You could do something pretty damn good with that. But that’s not what they did. This film reads like it was made by someone very much like Ryan, who probably wrote it by saying “you know what else would be cool? If there were zombies too!” Oh wait, that’s right - the guy who played Ryan wrote the film. It all makes so much more sense now.
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