This review contains spoilers – be warned.
Evy hosts a podcast with his friend Justin. Their podcast specifically deals with discussing paranormal phenomena and they seem to have cultivated some sort of audience – rather surprising considering throughout the entire film they struggle to record more than 10 minutes at a time for their next episode, but that is besides the point. They come upon some mysterious recordings – the sort of thing that screams out that you probably shouldn’t be listening to them, but regardless both Evy and Justin do it anyway out of morbid curiosity. Some bad things start to happen later, specifically with regards to Evy’s own mother whom she is also taking care of within the same house.
It’s the kind of premise that is clearly inspired by a less skeptical era of the Internet when people were innocuously passing around creepy stories via email chains (and if you don’t pass it on, you die!). Director Ian Tuason had also mentioned during the Q&A that I was at that he came up with the idea during the pandemic as he was taking care of his parents who were both ill at that point. It seems like the approach to keep the setting very simple – to not film any of the action outside of the house does make this even more reminiscent of the pandemic-era, a time when many productions also took on a similarly tight and minimalist approach with regards to setting and staging. Of consideration as well is the $500,000 budget for which this movie clearly needed to stretch every dollar and dime, and it does look well-made for that budget.
Something I thought about as I was watching the film was the rather unsettling underlying karmic messaging surrounding podcasts or other online content that revolves around a person’s final moments – a commonality mostly specific to true crime subject matter and the community that has spawned out of said content. Their deaths are reduced to audio recordings online for others to consume and gawk at to potentially unhealthy levels, with others also creating their own content piggybacking off of such tragedy either for profit, attention or other self-benefits. It is only fitting that the ending has Evy also being reduced to an audio recording, much like the very couple in the mysterious audio recordings that Evy and Justin are also paying attention to.
Nina Kiri does a nice job putting on a one-woman show, although I do wish she actually had somebody to properly bounce off of especially during the podcast scenes besides Adam DiMarco’s voice. Besides that, there are some nice visual moments and scares such as the dream/nightmare sequences involving Evy’s mother, or the last 10 minutes where the lines start to blur between Evy’s own perception of the way things are and the reality outside of that. In general there’s a lot of good use of negative space going on throughout given the limited setting, even if the most effective visual moments did leave me wanting more on that side of things in contrast with the audio. But one thing that cannot be denied is the sound design – something a lot of reviews would have already touched on, and so I’m not sure there’s anything more that I can add there 😊.
