As someone who has made short films before I have a ton of respect for anyone that gets their film made. ESPECIALLY on the deep-indie level. My first short I lost a chunk of my cast after shooting about half of the movie. I had a long moment where I wanted to hang it up and call it a day but I retooled it, I recast some parts, and we powered through because the people that invested their time in the film deserved it. I say atll that as a way to say – hey man, I get it.
Making a movie on any level is amazing, and rewarding, and fun, and heartbreaking, and frustrating, and folks that finish their movies deserve credit for it.
However they turn out.
It means something.
WE FOUND SOMETHING finds a brother and sister heading out to a remote area to practice rock climbing. The brother takes cameras to film everything so they can chronicle everything. We learn early on that the sister has something she is trying to tell her brother but can’t get it out. The two of them find an area and prepare to climb but first cross some caution tape. The climb goes great but on their way out they catch sight of something strange that they can’t get out of their heads. A grotesque figure. The brother can’t get the image of the thing out of his head and insists they go back to try to find it. They return and find an abandoned tent and when they look inside find the body of a young woman who at first appears dead but who they realize is still alive. They leave the woman behind, frightened, but take her phone with them. On the phone they find a video the woman recorded for her vlog where she is taking on a social media challenge where she was trying to camp out on her own over night. We find though that she encountered a creature that attacked her and was the same one the brother and sister had seen. The brother can’t stand the idea that they left the woman to die so they find a makeshift weapon in their car and head back to check on her, their phones not getting any service to call for help. They find the girl gone but catch sight of the creature and the brother heads after it. As the night falls they find the lair of the creature and discover that they may have underestimated what this creature is.
We find at the end of the credits that the film was improvised, and looking a little deeper, it seems that to great degrees it was. My guess is they had the overarching story and scenarios and then utilized improv after that. The director has a deep love of BLAIR WITCH PROJECT so you can see what his inspiration is. You can see where the film could be improv-ed. The acting is all over the place until it gets to the more emotional moments and then it really shines with the two leads really playing off one another well. The big problem with their making this an improv film is that there’s not enough real meat on this bone so it feels like a lot of filler. The heart of the film is the creature and it’s…pretty awful. It’s something that, had they shot it in glimpses or only in the dark it may have worked well but they really feature it and, while I have seen worse it also takes you out of the movie when you see it and kills any tension. I do give them credit that they do a heck of a lot better job than a lot of found footage films by sticking to the rules of the subgenre and I appreciate that.
Overall, it’s not great. There’s an interesting twist, and the movie within a movie is really good. The emotional acting between the two is great too. Other than that, it’s just not something I’d recommend. I admire that they did it, and got distribution for it, that’s amazing. I feel like this needed to take more pages from the BWP book though and have way less creature and more tension by doing it. In the end it comes off as a screw around and find out movie where the siblings sorta buy what happens to them because of their hubris.
Alas, I can’t recommend it but kudos for their making it.
1.5 out of 5
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 