Disc Reviews

The Invoking Review

• 13th May 2014

Four young students drive out to the backwoods of Sedar Ridge in the Mid-West to the former home of one of the group, Sam. She has not been there since the age of 5. They’re staying for a vacation and camping trip. They are greeted at the property by Eric, a rather strange young man who claims that he remembers Sam. The property itself has a lot of the elements in the décor of a place you’d typically see in a film of this type: some creepy object d’art (a creepy porcelain spaniel is one such object that provides one of the creepiest moments in the film just after the party arrive at the house), old furniture and furnishings and dark spaces and corners. They are we are reliably informed, in the middle of nowhere.  Setting up camp outside the property they like to tell each other (the usual) macabre tales. Eric grows stranger and stranger as Sam’s friend Mark becomes increasingly suspicious of Eric to the point of being hostile. Meanwhile Roman, another friend seems to be growing more and more depressed. Eric explains that he knew Sam as a child and they were the closest of friends until the terrible events which unfolded took Sam away from him forever. Sam grows increasingly disturbed as she has no recollection of this past. Over the course of the next couple of days Roman begins to fall into a deeper depression, Mark becomes growingly suspicious of Eric, Eric seems more disturbing by the moment and Sam begins to hallucinate the family events she has no conscious memory of with Mark standing in for her apparently abusive father and her other friend, the flighty Caitlin as her abused mother. Are these hallucinations or are they genuine hauntings?

Director, writer and director of photography Jeremy Berg has made his first feature with this film and unfortunately it is something of a mixed bag. The acting is quite dreadful, sucking much of the atmosphere out of the film while the story and action lacks much in the way of the terror it promises; indeed there are very few moments of horror, but equally refreshingly there is a lack of blood and guts or ghouls. Where the film does work well is through some deliberately stark and sharp shooting of the natural locations to all appearances cold and isolating in which Berg’s camera seems to linger on a landscape. Added to this is the soundtrack which is equally brooding and almost, but not quite saves the film from just being dreadful thereby giving the impression that in some areas Berg has something to offer the genre.

As is usual for the modern horror film the cover looks to promise much in the way of shocks but fails to deliver and is therefore deceptive and not giving a true image of the film. Besides a few trailers the only notable extra is a Making Of documentary that at 77 minutes is quite long and dull – surely a 20 minute documentary would have sufficed but does show how to make a film with a next-to-nothing budget and make best use of resources.

Chris Hick