When her daughter disappears in the cellar of the family's new home, a mother suspects the arcane symbols left by the previous owner are the key to finding her again.
Ambitious horror that feints toward sci-fi through quantum physics but ends up in metaphysics. The quantum idea is brought in through the touching use of Schrödinger's Cat as a metaphor for the plight of mother and daughter, but it doesn't really inform the story. Instead, we're presented with mathematical language as a means of imposing order on chaos, but which opens the door to an evil from another world. The evil has to be confronted on its own terms, which takes us into the other world, where we find the opposite proposition: mathematics shows the way to an eternal reality - the ideal form of what we only perceive in our world as shadows, but a horrible ideal.
It's Plato according to Lucifer. There is some internet-research guff about alchemy and the Knights Templar, when direct reference to Pythagorean mysticism would have been more interesting, but the guiding motto Dissolve and Coagulate is an application of the theory of forms, in which a thing is mirrored back from the other world in its real essence - in this story, the essence of evil.
That's how I read it, and the intrigue grows as the plot unfolds, but getting there is a mixed experience. One mark of a good horror is how we're taken through the looking glass, from safety to mortal danger, and here the trick is pulled off with chilling simplicity during a phone call - excellent bit of sound design. The climax heaves into view with twenty five minutes to go, but its energy builds with style into a grand vista of eternity in hell. Whew!
On the downside, much of the screenplay is cliche, from the sullen teen, to ye-olde-house (ludicrously over-sized), to the marketing babble of the irrelevant boardroom scenes. Underlying all is the fact this story is a retread of Poltergeist, so confining itself to a variation rather than presenting something fresh. Also a few threads that should have been snipped off: the reference to anarchism, which seems to become conflated with the nihilistic ankle tattoo, and the gratuitous Hitler quote right before the explanation of the Hebrew letters. (I hope it's gratuitous, because it does chime with Plato's view of democracy.) They made the same mistake in The Exorcist. And is direct police involvement really needed? Entia non sunt multiplicanda.
The biggest problem is with the orchestral music effects, which overwhelm the experience. Perfectly good for the grand climax, and I'm complaining not about the manipulation but about being made conscious of it. So for the first twenty minutes it's all squealing violins and moaning cellos, even playing over the spooky old voice recording - why ruin one sound effect with another? I recently came across the same problem in The Golem, and it grinds my teeth.
The performances are OK, but I felt the lead didn't convey enough terror in her search for the daughter - too composed. Nothing remarkable about the camera work, although the depiction of the other world is impressive. Surprised that mirror imagery wasn't used to support the central idea.
Overall: Valiant failure to overcome early problems.
Ambitious horror that feints toward sci-fi through quantum physics but ends up in metaphysics. The quantum idea is brought in through the touching use of Schrödinger's Cat as a metaphor for the plight of mother and daughter, but it doesn't really inform the story. Instead, we're presented with mathematical language as a means of imposing order on chaos, but which opens the door to an evil from another world. The evil has to be confronted on its own terms, which takes us into the other world, where we find the opposite proposition: mathematics shows the way to an eternal reality - the ideal form of what we only perceive in our world as shadows, but a horrible ideal.
It's Plato according to Lucifer. There is some internet-research guff about alchemy and the Knights Templar, when direct reference to Pythagorean mysticism would have been more interesting, but the guiding motto Dissolve and Coagulate is an application of the theory of forms, in which a thing is mirrored back from the other world in its real essence - in this story, the essence of evil.
That's how I read it, and the intrigue grows as the plot unfolds, but getting there is a mixed experience. One mark of a good horror is how we're taken through the looking glass, from safety to mortal danger, and here the trick is pulled off with chilling simplicity during a phone call - excellent bit of sound design. The climax heaves into view with twenty five minutes to go, but its energy builds with style into a grand vista of eternity in hell. Whew!
On the downside, much of the screenplay is cliche, from the sullen teen, to ye-olde-house (ludicrously over-sized), to the marketing babble of the irrelevant boardroom scenes. Underlying all is the fact this story is a retread of Poltergeist, so confining itself to a variation rather than presenting something fresh. Also a few threads that should have been snipped off: the reference to anarchism, which seems to become conflated with the nihilistic ankle tattoo, and the gratuitous Hitler quote right before the explanation of the Hebrew letters. (I hope it's gratuitous, because it does chime with Plato's view of democracy.) They made the same mistake in The Exorcist. And is direct police involvement really needed? Entia non sunt multiplicanda.
The biggest problem is with the orchestral music effects, which overwhelm the experience. Perfectly good for the grand climax, and I'm complaining not about the manipulation but about being made conscious of it. So for the first twenty minutes it's all squealing violins and moaning cellos, even playing over the spooky old voice recording - why ruin one sound effect with another? I recently came across the same problem in The Golem, and it grinds my teeth.
The performances are OK, but I felt the lead didn't convey enough terror in her search for the daughter - too composed. Nothing remarkable about the camera work, although the depiction of the other world is impressive. Surprised that mirror imagery wasn't used to support the central idea.
Overall: Valiant failure to overcome early problems.