Movies
[BD Review] ‘The Apparition’ Unfocused and Overdeveloped
Todd Lincoln’s The Apparition wastes no time spooking audiences. The supernatural horror from Warner Bros. opens with not one, but two fantastic sequences that set the table for what should be the premiere haunter of the year. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is bogged down with heavy exposition, lack of rules, and a lackluster performance from Sebastian Stan.
Apparition opens Found Footage-style with a look back to the 1970’s when an experiment resurrects a recently deceased scientific team member. The result is a shaky table and a photo with a black figure standing in the back. It then cuts to present day where another group of scientists hope to recreate the experiment, and take it a step further (with the use of modern technology). The footage cuts when that super hottie from Friday the 13th (Julianna Guill) is sucked into blackness.
Post title card, everything quickly stumbles downhill as we’re introduced to Kelly (Ashley Greene) and Ben (Sebastian Stan), who go shopping at Costco and stuff. It’s super interesting (but not really). They move into a new house owned by Kelly’s parents, and almost immediately are in the middle of various supernatural events (like tables moving by themselves).
The biggest problem with The Apparition is that the story behind haunting is way, way, wayyyyy more interesting than the relationship between Kelly and Ben, who, sad to say, could both die for all I care. The entire Found Footage angle was visually more appealing, and more so, it was frightening.
Speaking of Ben and Kelly… While I was surprisingly impressed with Greene’s performance, Stan was awkwardly miscast. It also didn’t help that I felt like neither of them were ever in any real danger. Lincoln makes a noble attempt to explain why the duo remain in such an obvious haunted house, and even forces them into a hotel stay, but ultimately none of it felt “real” because of their passé attitude about the situation. What really dragged down the tension and scares was that there appeared to be no rules for the demon. In fact, Lincoln fills the meat of the film with exposition to tell the viewer just that. There’s literally a scene where Ben and Kelly hear a recording of Patrick (Tom Felton) – explaining that there are no rules or pattern for the demon, which is a complete copout.
The same issue arises when he attempts to explain why there‘s a “Grudge”-esque ghost and other unexplained oddities – Lincoln has a character state that, when haunted, one “can’t tell what’s real and what’s fake.” That’s one way to qualify putting anything you want in a film with no rhyme, reason *or* explanation.
I really wanted to like The Apparition, and think Lincoln had some really good ideas hiding within. His directing style was appealing, especially in those earlier sequences, and he got quite the performance out of both Greene and Felton (I kept wishing the entire movie was about his character). If anything, the final product feels a bit tampered with (like there were a million hands all over the film).
In the end it just feels like Apparition is unfocused and overdeveloped (it’s obvious they even tacked on an extra ending). While there were some fantastic scares (especially the shower scene), most of the pic was deluded with unnecessary exposition and a dreadfully uninteresting arc between Ben and Kelly. It will forever and ever bother me wondering what a movie about the actual scientists might have been like.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
You must be logged in to post a comment.