I liked the movie.
It's just great for indie.
He's a super suspense tester, he's always on edge.
Interesting live camera, plot justified.
Well-chosen actors, types. The girl-emo even without any makeup looks magically fascinating and disturbing. There's not the slightest playfulness, very convincing. You believe it's really made like a home video, not a memorized role. Guys are natural and exist in the frame for real. Their reactions are understandable and always justified.
Excellent interiors - no artificiality in anything. In some places (especially the kitchen-dining room) resembles the Japanese horror game Silen Hill (maybe because of the authenticity of the American interior).
The spirit is breathtaking with fear, when the characters wander with flashlights along the narrow passages of the courtyard, a lot of uninvented details around, looks alive and real.
“Story holes”, in my opinion, no – because we were explained from the very beginning, in the initial frames of the film, that these are materials from the case, discs with recordings from video cameras and student practice. They should be fragmentary.
Fear is when we finish drawing and folding something in our head, rather than seeing a repulsive and chewed picture (when you chewed everything and put it in your mouth). In the sense of creating fear in the film everything is done properly.
The theme of the forbidden fruit and snake is also unobtrusive, but acts on the subconscious.
I really liked the moment in the library, when the girl was hiding, and then nicely bowed - humor and discharge of tension.
A little lacked lora, they could sit longer in the library and on the Internet, studying and commenting on information on history.
And yet, it is a pity that the limited budget did not allow us to introduce a memorable soundtrack into the film, at least on the credits.
Most of all, I liked that the author did not go about the well-trodden moralizing and Protestant story about vicious teenagers who went into all serious and received what they deserved. Here are very nice guys who read a prayer before eating, right, kind and well-mannered. No rudeness, no harshness, no respect for each other. Everything bad happened to them because they were in a bad place.
The fact that there are almost no special effects: we are not shown anything that is not in the materials of the criminal case. We can only see exactly what the camera saw. No more, no less. No staged scenes or dream recordings were promised.
It is a pity that there are no subtitles - neither in English nor in Russian. But, in principle, it is clear and so.
The film is excellent, built very competently.