Dir - Ryota Kondo
Overall: MEH
Sadly, the full-length debut Missing Child Videotape from Japanese filmmaker Ryota Kondo is a near disastrous experiment that nevertheless has its heart in the right place. That is to say that it has its heart in strict adherence to the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who champions still, quiet dread and the calm placement of hair-raising supernatural set pieces. Kondo's due diligence here takes this much lauded aesthetic, (in and of itself a reactionary one against the type of hyper-edited jump scare-drenched tripe that has plagued horror cinema on all sides of the globe for decades), and goes so vehemently far with it that the results are borderline unwatchable. There is hardly any incidental music, (a good thing), the performances from the small cast barely register beyond mildly startled, (also a good thing), contemporary J-horror, found footage, and folk horror elements are blended into an initially fetching missing persons case, (as the title would suggest), but the film lingers in its motionless style at the expense of moving anything along. The camera sits still as scenes go on and on and on, which would be fine if there were any developments in the already rudimentary narrative. By the time that things actually get going, it meanders into an ambiguous haze that is simply frustrating due to the, well, frustrating presentation of the entire movie.
Dir - Sean Nichols Lynch
Overall: MEH
One of many faulty horror mockumentaries, The Ceremony Is About to Begin comes off as a comparatively less insulting Creep, but this is about the faintest praise which can be heaped upon anything, let alone this. Nearly everything about the movie's execution is unconvincing, and when dealing within the found footage framework, this is a grievous error. It begins as a talking heads documentary about your every day cult which is lead by a mysterious guru, but this intro sets off a curious tone that rushes along as various actors who come off as actors tell vague anecdotes about their time spent on a California commune that is only a couple hundred yards away from a visible and busy highway. The "archival" footage of their Egyptian-loving leader all looks as if it was filmed in about five minutes, and once we are introduced to Chad Westbrook Hinds' laughably shady antagonist, the plausibility meter is obliterated. Narrative wise, there are at least attempts made to explain why our documentarian hero continues to film and not immediately turn around and notify any form of law enforcement, but these reasons do not hold up under any scrutiny and only usher in one "Wait, huh?" detail after the other to take the viewer out of the proceedings. The ending packs a grim and campy wallop, or at least it would if any part of the presentation maintained verisimilitude.
Dir - Aislinn Clarke
Overall: GOOD
Though one could argue that it is derivative of contemporary folk horror, (there is a lot of Robert Eggers' The Witch in here, amongst other things), Irish filmmaker Aislinn Clarke's Frewaka expertly juggles its sinister mood with cultural and generational shifts, all within a country whose occupants are still reeling from the harrowing treatment of its citizens. Similar to her full-length debut The Devil's Doorway, (which was also formulaic, bet it in a different sense), Clarke is specifically concerned with the suffrage of women in such a cripplingly religious environment. Her two protagonists, (Clare Monnelly and Bríd Ní Neachtain), are separated by several decades, yet they share a tormented bound, with fanatical Christian dogma and ancient pagan folklore each becoming inescapable forces that have and still are lumbering upon them. The movie lays heavily into psychological terrain, where both Monnelly and Neachtain either come from or plainly suffer from mental illness, allowing for numerous set pieces where seemingly impossible supernatural occurrences can be happening within their own cracked psyche. Clarke's screenplay may not dive into its rural mythology enough to provide concrete rules that are to be followed, but this is intentional since the emphasis lies elsewhere anyway, namely on how its characters become beaten down by such forces.
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