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Tour the Ghost City of Pripyat in the ‘Chernobyl VR Project’
There are countless ghost towns scattered about this big blue planet, though few have achieved the level of name recognition that Pripyat has today. It will have been two decades next year since the Chernobyl Power Plant went nuclear, literally, claiming the lives of 31 people. That number doesn’t include the many lives that were cut short due to radiation sickness, nor does it mention the hundreds of thousands of lives that were frozen in time when the city was evacuated.
Pripyat has appeared in various movies and video games before, but none have been so focused on capturing it in its entirety. The dedication of its developer is part of what makes the Chernobyl VR Project so exciting. It’s far more ambitious than your average simulator.
Polish developer Farm 51 qualified as a Chernobyl research team to get access to areas of the city that would’ve been otherwise inaccessible to us normies. Their goal is to create an accurate virtual reality experience that lets anyone with a VR headset tour a world that’s inaccessible to most.
It’s coming from the same team that made the horror-themed shooter Necrovision, so haunting visuals should fit comfortably within their wheelhouse. Unlike their previous work, the Chernobyl VR Project relies almost entirely on the tech that’s being used to recreate it.
Light field, photogrammetry and stereoscopic, 360-degree camera technology is a seemingly nonsensical string of words that describes the incredible effort that’s going into this project. It’s advanced stuff, but it’s not entirely new to video games. Photogrammetry, for example, was used by The Astronauts when they were building the near-photorealistic world of Ethan Carter.
The Chernobyl VR Project will support the major VR headsets, including Gear VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. There’s no release date for this just yet, but Farm 51 is expected to show it off for the first time on April 26, the 30th anniversary of the disaster.
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
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