The Binding opens up kind of cool. A mother is in her home when she hears her baby crying in a back room. She goes to check on her and that baby isn’t there. Naturally she panics and begins to frantically search the entire house. She continues to hear the baby cry but fails to ever find her. This would be a frightening situation for any parent. As the audience it’s easy to sense her fear.

After that brief opening the movie gets into its actual story. What that is I’m not entirely sure. I have a general idea of what was happening in the movie but very little of it made any sense to me.

Bram (Josh Heisler) and Sarah (Amy Gumenick) are a young married couple with an infant daughter. The family is very devout and Bram is even a young pastor.

After the day of their daughter’s christening Bram starts acting a little strange. When Sarah finally confronts him about his behavior, Bram claims that he received a visit from God. Bram struggles to describe it but he states that God came to him and spoke to him. Given their deep religious beliefs, Sarah and Bram both view this as a positive thing. Unfortunately it’s anything but.

As the days pass Bram starts acting more and more strange. He struggles to sleep and one night Sarah catches him standing in the hallway repeatedly banging his head against the wall. He bangs it so much that he leaves behind a good streak of blood. Things really take a turn for the worse when Bram states God spoke to him and said that the must kill his own daughter by cutting her heart out of her chest. When Bram says this his voice changes. He sounds possessed.

Eventually Sarah reaches her tipping point and takes their daughter and moves in with friends. She’s fearful for her daughter’s life, understandably so, but she still loves Bram. They work together to get Bram help – first medication, then seeing a psychiatrist and eventually by performing an exorcist. Bram appears to get better and eventually Sarah and their daughter move back in. But has Bram really gotten better?

After the opening scene The Binding goes down hill. The first 25-30 minutes border on unwatchable. Everything outside of that fist scene during that time is very boring and uninteresting. Once we get around to the idea of Bram possibly being possessed things start to pick up a tad but not enough to save the film from its variety of issues.

The success of The Binding hinges on the relationship between Sarah and Bram. For this movie to work at all you need to believe those two have a very loving and strong relationship. We need to see how this possession, if that’s what it is, is so powerful that it is able to get in the way of a loving marriage. The problem is I could not figure out why Sarah and Bram were together in the first place. There is zero chemistry between those two. Outside of their shared disgust for gay people, which Sarah at least realizes is wrong and changes her stance on, they seem to have zero in common. They feel more like a couple that hooked up one night, got knocked up and decided to get married. I sense no real love between the two.

The acting in the movie is, it’s bizarre. Bizarre I think is the best way to describe it. It’s bad but not in the way that you typically see bad acting. At least this applies to the characters of Sarah and Bram. They just make really strange choices when it comes to deciding whether or not a line should be delivered yelling with anger or taking a more calm, subtle approach. It kind of feels like they’re going through rehearsals trying to figure out how they want to portray their characters but those first rehearsals were filmed and released as the finished product. I say that because it feels like there are capable actors there but they fail to ever come out.

Aside from the weird acting and lack of chemistry from our two leads, the biggest issue with The Binding is that it’s boring. It’s never scary or interesting. It’s just boring. That’s the worst thing for a movie to be. A movie can be horrendous but still manage to entertain by being interesting but if a movie is boring? Well then it’s just that, boring. The runtime is less than 90 minutes and this felt like a real struggle to finish.

The Binding is out now on Blu-ray from Scream Factory. It’s a new film that was shot on a red so naturally the picture quality is quite good. In fact I would say the camerawork is the highlight of the movie. A lot of the film (if not all) is shot handheld and I think that can be done in a way that adds an interesting layer to simple scenes. There is a scene in The Binding where Bram is giving a sermon and is just about to lose it. The scene is shot handheld with a lot of close ups and the camera has constant motion to it. I think that works really well and makes a scene of a guy just talking far more interesting.

The Blu-ray also includes deleted scenes, interviews with the cast and an audio commentary with the film’s writer/director Gus Krieger. Unfortunately I didn’t like the movie enough to watch these special features, but they’re all there.

The Binding is a possession movie (I guess) and not a particularly memorable one. If you’re going to let a movie possess you, you can do a lot better than this one.

The Binding is now available on Blu-ray from Scream Factory.