The mouths were wrong...

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2009)

For the life of me I can't understand how this film generated such good word of mouth. No doubt if the stuff that happens in this film happened to you in real life you'd be scared witless. Doors open and close in the middle of the night, loud bangs disturb the peace in the dead of night, hapless victims are dragged by their ankle from their bed as they sleep – it would be enough to drive you crazy with fear. Trouble is, when you transfer all this to the big screen and use Blair Witch-style home video recordings to show it all, it all comes across as a little 'so'what?'
It doesn't help that Micah, the boyfriend of Katie, the girl with her own demonic stalker, is the kind of smug idiot who films himself strumming the guitar and seems intent on irritating whatever it is that his girlfriend has bought into the house at every opportunity. He films everything, and ignores her repeated and increasingly short-tempered pleas to switch the damn thing off, and he prolongs arguments by refusing to answer questions with answers. Together, they're the kind of couple you might enjoy seeing once or twice a year, but any more and you'd really start looking for ways to avoid them, regardless of whether their demon was in tow. Add to the fact that they refuse to take the obvious steps any normal person would take, and you end up being too irritated with them to care what fate awaits. I know if the demonologist the ghost guy had recommended couldn't make it the first thing I'd do is rustle up a small army of parapsychologists (or whatever those crackpots are called) on the basic principle that there's safety (and comfort) in numbers. I'd phone the local TV station too, and the local papers. But these two bozos seem to be cocooned in a world of their own and choose to simply tough it out alone when the demon guy is out of town for a couple of days.
On the plus side, the film's well-made on a tiny budget, and the two leads perform well, but that's about all it's got going for it. When the film finished the audience in the cinema remained rooted in their seats, not because they were terrified or stunned by what they had seen, but because they weren't quite sure whether the film was actually over or not. It's the only time I've ever known an entire audience (although it was pretty small, admittedly) sit through the credits and the minute or so of blank screen that followed waiting for some after-credits clip to somehow make it all worth while. Only when the lights came on and we all blinked at each other with a kind of bemused disbelief that we'd actually sat through the entire film did we begin to file dejectedly from the theatre.