Reviews
[Review] ‘Transference’ Takes You on a Creepy Virtual Head-Trip
Nestled among the usual fare at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 showcase was an appearance by Elijah Wood, there to talk up SpectreVision’s VR sci-fi horror title Transference. Once the trailer had finished, it was clear we had something interesting on our hands.
A head-tripping blend of first-person horror game and live action scenes set within a creepy simulation of several people’s brain data is certainly an enticing prospect, but can it deliver an effective brain-bending dose of existential horror?
The entire simulation is set in and around the home of Raymond Hayes, a troubled scientist with a streak of brilliance. He seemingly created a digital representation of himself, his wife Katherine, and their boy by using brain data from each, and those avatars are present in the simulation too. Unfortunately, there’s a corruption running rife inside the simulation as well, and you’re tasked with cleaning up the glitches and errors whilst uncovering the darker side to Raymond’s family life.
Transference is a familial horror underneath the sci-fi gubbins. It’s clear early on that Raymond’s obsession with his projects is taking a toll on his relationship with his wife and child and that may well be playing its own part in the strange and dark avenues this virtual realm takes you down.
You begin just outside the apartment block, tasked with looking for a key to the front door. Once you do find it and enter the building, you’re soon presented with an example of how messed up this simulation is after a disturbing scene in the foyer. So begins a nightmarish look into a botched science project saturated with family issues. What will be more disturbing? The flaws in the software? Or the revelations that could be uncovered about Raymond’s family life? You’ll find out soon enough.
Transference’s greatest strength is in its separation of perceived reality and the virtual world you inhabit. Strapping on a PSVR headset to enter a 3D virtual world is nothing new now, but for a game to actually make that process part of the game? It’s a novel, meta take and the game enjoys messing with its digital realm to disorientate you. There was a claim from Mr. Wood back at E3 that Transference would bridge the gap between games and film with its mix of FMV and digital constructs, but all Transference’s strengths lie in how it plays with the nature of being ‘a game’ and the FMV scenes that do pepper the exposition are actually quite limited. Effective? Yes, but they aren’t a seamless bridge between mediums that was touted.
The constant reminders that you’re in an artificial world include glaring error messages where items should be (usually a hint that you should find that item and restore the data to the program to help ‘clean’ it) and a dark glitchy entity who periodically stalks you around the apartment. You can also switch between different builds of the apartment, clearly taken from more than one point in time in the real world. This is integrated into puzzle-solving, allowing you to bring items from one build to another.
This is a game that’s assured enough to let you take your time discovering its story. That means the pace is on the slow side, and while that’s great for letting you really tuck into the smaller details of the Hayes family and their troubles, it is, unfortunately, a tad cynical with it. The entire game is an escape room, with smaller escape room puzzles chained together to crack the overall puzzle. This causes a fair bit of repetition and fumbling towards the next checkpoint. The puzzles are fair, challenging, and generally in keeping with the themes of the narrative, but certain times it just feels like you’re being tasked with busywork to pad the runtime (Transference clocks in a little under three hours). It’s a shame because Transference can be really good at ratcheting up the unease otherwise, and it’s the time afforded to each dread-induced moment that really brings the payoff.
That disorientation the simulation provides is another key aspect of Transference’s success. Overlapping and distorted sound bites, manic flashing glitch voids, and the shifts between software builds changing parts of the environment. It escalates slowly but surely before usually ending each ‘chapter’ of the simulation with a crescendo of disturbing imagery. It’s never graphic or gory, just an explosion of sensory assaults that are befitting of a game centered on a corrupted artificial world.
The brevity of the story does fit well for the pace, but replayability is limited. Once you’ve discovered all the secrets of the Hayes family the first time around, you’re left with some collectible pickups and little else as the knowledge gained from a first run does detract much of the spectacle, drama, and of course, scares from the story. At around $25 at launch, three and a bit hours of game is pushing it a bit, no matter how effective and absorbing it can get. Value is all relative of course, but it does feel like Ubisoft has put the game in a tough spot with that price point and it deserves better than that as a drawback.
It is at least playable both in VR and Non-VR modes, and it loses little of its atmosphere without a VR unit on your face. All the same, this feels like it was made for VR, both mechanically and thematically, so you do lose out on something by playing it on a regular screen. Whichever way you play it, savor it, put its occasional structural flaws to one side and drink in the delivery of its story. You may as well squeeze as much juice out of your first time with the game because it’s rapidly diminishing returns from there.
Transference is in some ways, a tighter twist on Bloober Team’s Observer (with a dash of that company’s Layers of Fear in the mix). But it never reaches the loopy and inventive highs of that game’s head-fuckery. Not that there isn’t merit to the strange and disturbing places Transference goes because it definitely has a good line in loopy. It just needed a bit more substance to the quieter moments.
PS4/PSVR Review copy purchased by Reviewer
Transference is out now on PSVR, PS4, Xbox One, and PC (Oculus and Vive)
Reviews
‘The Voices of Our Mother’ Review: Family Trauma Fuels This Uneven Shudder Possession Horror Film
Possession horror that focuses on the family of the afflicted, rather than the afflicted themselves or the doctors and priests tasked with solving a supernatural mystery, is often the most interesting approach in the subgenre. There are so many layers to it, questions of faith and belief, and searching for scapegoats even as someone you love suffers. It’s very fertile ground, and the new Shudder original The Voices of Our Mother approaches it with an interesting hook: What if the family members of a person who might be possessed come to the problem not out of love, but out of obligation?
It’s an interesting angle, and when combined with a dreamy visual style and a handful of confident performances, Mark O’Brien‘s film starts with a lot of promise and maintains a consistent dramatic tension throughout. There’s ambition here, and craft, and a sense of care that saves the film from oblivion, but unfortunately, thanks to confused pacing and certain baffling moments of characterization, all The Voices of Our Mother can really do, in the end, is avoid becoming a complete mess.
The mother of the title is Harriet (Sheila McCarthy), whose four adult children fled the home she shared with her own mother as quickly as they could and never looked back. For years, Harriet’s efforts to stay in touch with her children were in vain, at least until their grandmother dies suddenly and a devastated Harriet is hospitalized after a medical episode of her own. It’s only then that twin siblings William (O’Brien) and Therese (Carolina Bartczak), junkie baby brother Martin (Alex Ozerov-Meyer), and devoted nun Annika (Georgina Reilly) are forced to return home to bury their grandmother and deal with Harriet, whose physical and psychological issues are growing stranger by the day.
Photo Credit: Shudder
There’s a reason so many horror stories follow adults who must return to the site of their childhood trauma. It’s just such a charged environment for drama and psychological tension, as the characters fight to reconcile the understanding that comes with maturity with the rage and confusion they still feel over what happened long ago. O’Brien, who also wrote the screenplay, digs into this emotionally fertile ground immediately, showing us siblings who’ve left quite a few things unsaid, trying to reconnect even as their mother is constantly upsetting the delicate balance of peace they’re trying to construct for her.
In just his second feature as director (after 2021’s The Righteous), O’Brien recognizes the potency of the environment he’s created, and in the early minutes of the film, he exploits it. While Harriet recuperates in bed, the four siblings explore their various resentments, memories, and flat-out grudges from all angles, and it mostly works. The performances are solid, O’Brien works hard to infuse a genuinely distinctive visual style awash with dramatic reds and the glow of firelight into the proceedings, and the supernatural mystery at the core of the film is intriguing, if a little sloppily laid out. It’s a horror story built on the age-old conundrum over what to do with aging relatives with whom you’ve lost any real sense of emotional connection, and that’s palpably unsettling.
But these unsettling qualities never translate to real horror, or even a cohesive narrative, once the supernatural mystery of it all really starts rolling forward. As Harriet’s illness progresses, and she starts doing things like whispering secrets in her kids’ ears to turn them against each other, the film stirs up fresh drama but fails to deliver on the emotional throughlines of that drama. Characters make baffling decisions, and not in the way that horror characters often act out of passion or confusion or plain old fear.
Photo Credit: Shudder
The tension over Harriet’s real fate fades in and out as the kids squabble, and she only seems to act out in overtly horrifying ways when the script needs to wrap up an argument without ever actually arriving at any conclusions. It’s a shame, because when McCarthy’s actually able to flex her horror muscles and turn Harriet into something to be feared, she brings remarkably nuanced terror to the film, and yet the film barely wants to showcase it. It would rather, it seems, be a psychological drama about the fallout of Harriet’s illness, which would be fine if that drama held together. Instead, we’re left with a string of interesting scenes that never quite come together into a story worth following, and by the time the more overt horror elements kicked in, I’d grown too frustrated to really be hooked.
But The Voices of Our Mother is not all bad. McCarthy’s performance is solid, as is O’Brien’s, who injects a welcome naturalism into scenes that might otherwise be stiff. Reilly (who, as a Pontypool fan, I was just really happy to see), Bartczak, and Ozerov-Meyer bring their best to the material, but the film is just too tonally confused to deliver anything truly satisfying out of their work.
Still, I can’t help but think that with a little narrative tightening and some basic brush-ups on things like blocking and scene geography – the film is sometimes ambiguous on purpose but more often ambiguous by accident, like setups arrived half-formed – this thing could’ve gone much further. The Voices of Our Mother doesn’t work, but it’s far from a disaster, and I sincerely hope Mark O’Brien tries his hand at more horror in the future.
The Voices of Our Mother hits Shudder June 19.
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