Sharlto Copley wakes up in a huge grave full of dead bodies on a dark and stormy night. He has no idea who he is, where he is, or how the hell he got there. Although his bones appear to be extremely fragile, he manages to get out of the pit with the help of a mystery person. He heads towards a house where he finds himself amongst a group of people (Erin Richards, German actor Thomas Kretschmann, Hong Kong actress Josie Ho, and Joseph Morgan from “The Vampire Diaries”) who also don’t seem to know who they are and are reluctant to trust Copley. Slowly but surely, as they investigate the house, their memories start to come back slowly, though Ho’s mute character is very hard to communicate with. That’s all the plot you’re gonna get out of me, hell I might’ve even told you too much already.
Firstly, the good news: This 2014 mystery-horror film is a much better effort than the first English-language film from director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, the lame and unconvincing ‘found footage’ flick “Apollo 18”. In fact, it starts out rather well, as I tend to like films that give us characters waking up to an unfamiliar situation, possibly not even remembering who they are. Copley struggling his way out of a pit full of dead bodies during a storm was wonderfully Poe-esque and warmed by black heart.
OK, so that’s the good news pretty much, folks. Unfortunately, the director and his screenwriters Eddie Borey and Chris Borey botch things by making it pretty obvious from the opening scene (which in and of itself is an awesome-looking scene as I said) just where this thing is headed. That robs the film of any suspense or surprise it might’ve had, and basically, a lot of the interest too. It also doesn’t help that the characters aren’t interesting (nor afforded any depth, not even as the film goes on), nor are any of the performances particularly persuasive. Even Copley and Kretschmann fail to engage here all that much (though Kretschmann certainly fares best), whilst poor Josie Ho (what the hell is she doing here, of all people?) hasn’t got a chance with her useless role. There’s not much even Meryl Streep could do playing a mute whose language no one else speaks anyway.
I like the idea behind the film (people slowly remembering who and what they are) and the narrative technique used is a classic, but it has been pretty poorly botched here. That’s a shame because there’s something going on here on a conceptual level, and the final visual is truly, truly devastating, worthy of a much better film than this. Something tells me that if they make a sequel to this, it’ll likely be superior because it probably won’t have to worry about hiding (or failing to hide) its true nature.
The cinematography by José David Montero is really terrific, even if I’m getting mightily sick of the “TCM” remake shot of a building in the background and a person in the foreground shot from behind approaching it. Seriously filmmakers, stop doing it already!
OVERALL SUMMARY
For a film that starts off with Sharlto Copley waking up in a pit of bloody dead bodies on a wonderfully dark and stormy night, I ended up pretty disappointed with this one. It’s damn good-looking but entirely transparent, and not particularly interesting. It’s certainly not terrible, but it’s also not terribly memorable, either. It’s.meh.
