Fair warning, this is not to be confused with the Hugh Grant film.
HERETICS isn’t the first found footage film I have seen about cults, and it does feel like an apt way to look at them. Seeing a cult examined through the lens of a found footage film, and in this case from the perspective of devout Christians, is interesting. Both sides can see the other as blinded by their faith, and both are convinced of their righteousness, and somewhere in the middle their beliefs meet.
With the right film, there is a neat idea in examining a cult, especially from the first person – look at THE LAST EXORCISM, for a good example, but is HERETICS a good example?
HERETICS begins with a party. A group of friends are gathered together, having a fun night of food, drinks, and laughs. Over the course of the evening we see multiple camera angles of the party, as several of the friends are filming the night with their cameras. As the evening progresses tensions start to rise, and it’s decided that they should do something fun, and a little dangerous. The group decides to break into a nearby house said to have a dangerous past. They break in, and resume the party, but as they do, we see that there are also cameras in the home, and with this new perspective we also see that the friends are not alone there, and that they may have stumbled into something they could never have imagined.
This is “good friends and good times” sort of movie, with the emphasis really being on the friends and their friendships. A large chunk of the film is spent watching them party, as we get to learn their ins and outs and intricacies of their relationships with one another. Once the film shifts to the house things should get more interesting, but instead they just get more chaotic.
The house itself reminded me of the cabin from EVIL DEAD II, which was much larger than possible, once they get into the rooms, and walls, and it feels the same here. The house seems way too big for everything going on. Things also get confusing with the shifting perspectives due to the addition of these stationary cameras in the house.
I applaud the filmmakers for sticking to the parameters of the subgenre, and those rules, though they bend them a bit.
The acting is decent, the camera-work is hit-and-miss because it’s all handheld, save for those security cameras. Logic fails as the friends do things that don’t make sense, and still filming when things go crazy seems a bit much, phone light, sure, camera, eh? Why?
The biggest issues is that the movie sets up the cult, and dips into it a little but gives us a lot of spackle but no foundation. We never really get an idea of what the cult is, or why the people involved get into it. It’s just assumed that you either don’t care, or are taking the same leap that the filmmakers did with their logic.
The movie ramps up, and gets crazy, but the ending doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, and didn’t feel satisfying to me, but who can say, maybe you’ll be all in on it. It just didn’t work for me.
Overall, it’s interesting, but just doesn’t hold together. It’s not awful, it’s watchable, but there just needed to be more work done on the story, and on the reasoning for it all.
1.75 out of 5
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 