I admire the idea behind this, the vision, the attempt at making something unique, or at least quite different. But the admiration ends there, unequivocally. This is the most boring piece of slop I've ever seen pretend to be horror.
My first problem with this mockumentary, is that the directors seem to think, that to make it look real, they need to have interviews with the same people in different locations. I've hardly ever seen that in a real doc, people are interviewed once, in one location, but here the locations change, and all it does is confuse the viewer.
The second thing I found annoying was the overt political commentary. We get it, the whole town, not least of all the police, are racist bigots, they are white trash morons, they are the scum of the earth! Subtlety goes a long way in conveying social commentary, this is just so in your face, the directors might as well have made a tape of themselves shouting "all white people in southern states are evil" for 20 minutes.
Then there is the issue of the portrayal of victims. Granted, in true documentary style, a lot of the victims are getting a significant amount of screen time dedicated to them and their "memory". Whether this is done solely to maintain the illusion of a real documentary, or if it's also meant to have some sort of emotional resonance, I couldn't say. All I can say is that it's boring, and it takes up waaaay too much time! The idea that anyone would feel empathy (or any other emotion for that matter) watching home videos and hearing tearful remembrances of fake dead people, which seems to be the idea the directors had, is preposterous. It is insanely boring, to the point of being obnoxious.
Another annoying aspect, is Salazars inability to answer a question within 5 minutes. We get it, he's traumatized, and yes, once again, that might be the most realistic behavior. But even a REAL documentary, at least a decent one, would cut those long silences in post production, because when you've seen a man take forever to answer a simple question more than once, you get it, he is shock, it has been established, moving on. Not here, we are treated to the same coma inducing interview time and time again.
Last, but not least, the element of the still pictures, basically the center for the whole film, admirable as the vision and attempt is (like I said before), is just not effective as a horror trope. It's not scary, and since we know this is a work of fiction, albeit masquerading as fact, there is no suspense. We expect the pictures to be increasingly horrible (which they aren't), but knowing this is fiction, there are no limits to what we might see, and it eliminates any curiosity. In a real documentary we would be on the edge of our seats to know what the living hell is going on, but in a work of fiction, we know it's something monstrous. Another problem is that since we already know the story, the pictures are left revealing very little else than WHAT exactly killed the town. A better film would have let the pictures tell the story, but here we already have all the facts, the story is already over, before it even begins: A town has been wiped out, there is one survivor, he is obviously innocent, he has pictures of the whole thing to prove it, but the racists won't believe him, he is convicted, and his appeal is rejected. The only thing left to tell us, is what the creatures look like, and how they work, and the film takes an hour to do this, utilizing (of course) the most blurred series of black and white photographs ever taken in the history of mankind, because scary (at one point a "professional photographer" even calls the pictures perfect, as if that line is supposed to make us think the pictures are anything less than ridiculously bad).
This started off slow, and turned into nothing short of a boring mess of a film. If you wanna watch a great mockumentary horror, watch Lake Mungo (2008). In fact, watch anything but this drag.
My first problem with this mockumentary, is that the directors seem to think, that to make it look real, they need to have interviews with the same people in different locations. I've hardly ever seen that in a real doc, people are interviewed once, in one location, but here the locations change, and all it does is confuse the viewer.
The second thing I found annoying was the overt political commentary. We get it, the whole town, not least of all the police, are racist bigots, they are white trash morons, they are the scum of the earth! Subtlety goes a long way in conveying social commentary, this is just so in your face, the directors might as well have made a tape of themselves shouting "all white people in southern states are evil" for 20 minutes.
Then there is the issue of the portrayal of victims. Granted, in true documentary style, a lot of the victims are getting a significant amount of screen time dedicated to them and their "memory". Whether this is done solely to maintain the illusion of a real documentary, or if it's also meant to have some sort of emotional resonance, I couldn't say. All I can say is that it's boring, and it takes up waaaay too much time! The idea that anyone would feel empathy (or any other emotion for that matter) watching home videos and hearing tearful remembrances of fake dead people, which seems to be the idea the directors had, is preposterous. It is insanely boring, to the point of being obnoxious.
Another annoying aspect, is Salazars inability to answer a question within 5 minutes. We get it, he's traumatized, and yes, once again, that might be the most realistic behavior. But even a REAL documentary, at least a decent one, would cut those long silences in post production, because when you've seen a man take forever to answer a simple question more than once, you get it, he is shock, it has been established, moving on. Not here, we are treated to the same coma inducing interview time and time again.
Last, but not least, the element of the still pictures, basically the center for the whole film, admirable as the vision and attempt is (like I said before), is just not effective as a horror trope. It's not scary, and since we know this is a work of fiction, albeit masquerading as fact, there is no suspense. We expect the pictures to be increasingly horrible (which they aren't), but knowing this is fiction, there are no limits to what we might see, and it eliminates any curiosity. In a real documentary we would be on the edge of our seats to know what the living hell is going on, but in a work of fiction, we know it's something monstrous. Another problem is that since we already know the story, the pictures are left revealing very little else than WHAT exactly killed the town. A better film would have let the pictures tell the story, but here we already have all the facts, the story is already over, before it even begins: A town has been wiped out, there is one survivor, he is obviously innocent, he has pictures of the whole thing to prove it, but the racists won't believe him, he is convicted, and his appeal is rejected. The only thing left to tell us, is what the creatures look like, and how they work, and the film takes an hour to do this, utilizing (of course) the most blurred series of black and white photographs ever taken in the history of mankind, because scary (at one point a "professional photographer" even calls the pictures perfect, as if that line is supposed to make us think the pictures are anything less than ridiculously bad).
This started off slow, and turned into nothing short of a boring mess of a film. If you wanna watch a great mockumentary horror, watch Lake Mungo (2008). In fact, watch anything but this drag.