He lived, grew old and died. Theme & nbsp; and remembered. When I was eight years old, the movie Warlock 2 made me feel terrible. Shuddering with horror, I continued to stand, looking at the mirror reflecting through the narrow slit of the door ajar, a mesmerizing spectacle, afraid to miss even one shot. After reviewing the continuation of the cult film a dozen years later, I realized that there is nothing to be afraid of in it, and all the uniqueness of the emotions acquired in the process of viewing the picture was reduced to subjective, limited level of acquired spectator experience at the time of viewing, sophistication.
Since then, most of the horror films with the highest score on MoviePoisk have passed through the prism of my perception, and when they began to come to an end, I stopped disdaining films with a score below six, five and beyond. One can wonder how many Yakhonts are hidden from the mass user of these your turnets with low ratings and devastating reviews. However, in this case it is not about this, but about the reverse phenomenon. Independent cinema is independent of large studios and large budgets, which pursues a different goal, to give the viewer a film that is different from the patterns of a potentially successful film built by large companies. If not, it's history. If not history, then the methods that demonstrate it: plot, images, dialogues, acting out. This simple logical connection led me to think about what this film has to offer. I didn't find the answer to the question. Instead, he found something in common between his young self, greedily absorbing through the door slot every scene of a banal story set out in a mediocre film by the author, who wants to share with the world his not so common, but no more interesting point of view on the genre. We both had little experience. The movie wants to scare you. He's trying hard to scare. However, from the terrible in it there are only dangerous for people suffering from epilepsy video sequence, slowing down with a low FPS, red filters, gray filters, shots with a blocked horizon, angles from “unexpected” places, previously visited by other creators and an unexpectedly sharp increase in volume, terrible, by the way, annoying.
On the plot: Our hero, the teacher, has nightmares. The ghosts of the past and the present come to him, and the world is distorted, becoming more and more insane. The images of his visions increasingly invade reality, filling themselves around. The hero goes to the house of his childhood to dispel the blurred memories and understand the cause of his insanity, but he plunges deeper into the abyss of madness from which there is no way out. That doesn't sound very original. That is what it is.
On the characters: Very few of them. Cinema, of course, is almost chamber. A couple of locations, several actors. And there's pretty much nothing wrong. The relationship between the teacher and his casual companion develops rapidly and is not too implausible. I would like to say that this is one of the few true vectors chosen by the director in the film and well shown. Here, the awkwardness of the first meeting and indecision in communication and the development of relationships between the characters are shown well. Nice to meet you.
On the actors: I didn't find a Russian movie. I had to look in the original. And this did not affect the impressions in the best way. Of the actors distinguished only Alexandra Nicole Hulm. The only truly charming character in the film, she is not without flaws, but still coped well with the role. The others spoke like Bela Lugosi in a Browning painting. Maybe it was the author’s attitude, or just the actors read the memorized text without understanding, but almost everything sounded terribly unnatural. The case where the voiceover, for example, Hihidoka clearly would not harm perception.
Verdict: The film is certainly not hopeless. He at least due to his clumsiness and giddy looks, nevertheless, original, but this, of course, is not a plus. It is strange in places and, in principle, can help to spend a lonely evening without irritation, if you have a neutral mood and do not want to do anything useful. However, this is not the author’s horror film, the search for which is worth the time spent on it. Just such, for the most part, no spectacle from the author, who apparently wanted to say something, but did not know how.
With a stretch
5 out of 10