(R for profanity & some content): What a contrast to the expansive, exquisitly mounted tribute to Michael Jackson!
Guided perhaps by the success of "Blair Witch Project," with its under-budgeted, amateurish filming & acting techniques in natural settings, writer/director Oren Peli has opted for a 90-minute no-nonsense, no-frills, no-CGI supernatural horror thriller.
Using his own San Diego home (mainly the bedroom) for the setting and a pair of unknowns as actors, along with a third in two minor scenes, he sets up a story about a young woman, having been haunted off & on by a demon since childhood; at the start of the film she moves in with her boyfriend ("We're engaged to be engaged," he says, rather evasively.) for nearly a month of horrors.
In an attempt to figure out what's happening, the tech-oriented boyfriend rigs up a camera and other electronic stuff to record what goes on while they sleep - or try to sleep. The scares come in small doses - a door eerily moving - then escalates to noises beyond the bedroom, footprints on the floor, a chandelier swaying, a shadow on the door, the bedding moving - all indicating far more horror than the usual graphically exaggerated signs.
No blood letting, no slashings - the worst it gets is to reveal what look like bite marks on the girl's back. No screaming surround-sound horror music, just the thudding of footsteps on the stairs, the eerie underplayed noises that go bump in the night. The characters are so everyday normal that it's hard to get to know them as characters with any depth. As a result, what happens to them is the frightening building of tension and the little scare moments created to generate screams from the audience.
In fact, what made this such an expected sensation is the hype generated beforehand followed by the audience's Pavlovian reactions. Since I went to the theatre with no previous knowledge of the film, and since I was only one of a small handful of isolated people in the audience, there was no screaming whatever; each carefully built hint of horror, after an uncommonly bland beginning, was met with apathetic response. And when the final BIG SCARE arrived, followed by a black screen & silence, we all left with a shrug, with disappointment written on our faces.
I did not expect any extreme Hollywood style grossness, nor would I have welcomed it; yet on the other hand I felt that just a little more scare, as in the best of Hitchcock's or other well-made scare movies, would have been welcome. Whether Peli was motivated by Val Lewton's guide, to show less & hear more, or whether he simply hoped to make a lot of money expending a clever idea into a few thousand dollars expense, a month in filming and plenty of pre-publicity hype, I don't know. Whatever his motivation, it worked for prepped-up large midnight audiences, so he might be laughing his way to the bank. (Grade: B-)