Dir - Paul Gandersman/Peter S. Hall
Overall: MEH
It is unfortunate that so many filmmakers go the found footage route due to rising costs and diminishing, (if even existent), box office returns, the full-length debut Man Finds Tape from the writer/director team of Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall being one of the most poorly-suited to the mockumentary framework to come out in recent times. This is a bold statement since a solid case can be made that nearly every found footage movie would benefit from a more conventional and ergo more expensive approach, but it is doubly a shame here since Gandersman and Hall's narrative comes equipped with some refreshing tweaks and hooks. Some of the "tapes" that our central figure portrayed by William Magnuson discovers are bizarre enough to make any viewer sit up straight, and it all leads in a direction that would be difficult if impossible to guess. What does not work, (and this cannot be stated enough times with these films), is that the finished documentary-within-a-movie trajectory is both distracting and dilutes the necessary verisimilitude for any harrowing and/or otherworldly scenario to connect. Footage from an untold amount of cameras is cobbled together over a significant period of time, and scary music, subtitles to hear the muffled parts, text messages, 911 transcripts, sound effect enhancement, talking head interviews, and a non-linear presentation come off as unintentionally comical despite the humorless tone and undeniable supernatural events captured on film. It makes things needlessly clunky and infinitely less believable than if the finances were procured to simply do this as a "real" movie instead of one that awkwardly shoehorns itself into an oversaturated sub-genre that rarely if ever warrants being in that sub-genre.
Dir - Kurtis David Harder
Overall: MEH
A direct sequel to 2022's Influencer, the apply titled Influencers is a disappointing follow up to its clever if only partially successful predecessor. Director Kurtis David Harder pens the screenplay himself this time, joined once again by Cassandra Naud as the full-blown sociopath antagonist, as well as her final girl Emily Tennant who is desperate and determined to convince the world of the events of the first movie. The structure is jumbled up, opening with a nasty throat slitting, then jumping to Naud presumably living happily ever after having been left stranded on an island last we saw her, the dropping the opening titles arriving only once the second act begins and we catch up with Tennant playing catch up with her identity-stealing murderer. Harder keeps things easy to follow even as more timeline zig-zags happen from there, as well as plot holes collapsing upon themselves which become frustrating as things spiral into a ridiculous and schlocky finale that seems tonally divorced from what came before. It is this lack of focus that ultimately sinks the ship. The first film was able to make a chilling case for social media obsession via an exaggerated and comparatively less implausible scenario than what happens here, this time side-stepping pivotal information and character building in order to delight in reckless violence, manipulation, and one-upmanship.
Dir - Julia Ducournau
Overall: MEH
The third work from French filmmaker Julia Ducournau is both her weakest and easily most bleak, wearing its symbolism on its sleeve yet overstaying its welcome with a relentlessly dour and increasingly incoherent structure. Arriving five years after the onset of COVID, Alpha's viral outbreak premise inescapably recalls recent times and the current aftermath of those times on a surface level, (as well as the AIDS epidemic of yesteryear), but Ducournau's script is not interested in delving into societal discontent and division as she instead remains focused on those who are trying to save, (read into "control"), those whose behavior cannot be tamed. Well, that is one interpretation that is as good as any since one has to be generous in deciphering what Ducournau's broad intentions are here. Golshifteh Farahani's overwrought mother who is also a nurse is simultaneously dealing with a world gone to shit where a disease turns people into crumbling marble, her thirteen-year-old daughter is rebelling and being ostracized at school, and her infected junkie brother has a death wish that she keeps interfering with. There are other elements at play which may or may not be important, plus the story is told in a distracting manner that jumps between timelines, making it difficult not only to tell what is currently transpiring or what the point is in going back and forth in the first place. Things get more muddled and exhausting as it goes along, with zero room for humor. We get the picture after the first scene, and merely wallow in this word's misery from there.
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