The Last Footage, making its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia Festival, is billed as Myanmar’s debut on the found footage horror scene, and that’s exciting. It’s also exciting that the film, written and directed by Arkar Soe Oo, who also stars and is thus the principal camera operator, is tackling found footage from the angle of newly arrived smart glasses that can record 4K footage for hours on end.
Found footage progresses with technology to often startling effect, so that’s a great hook.
Unfortunately, the hooks are basically all we get from this one. Though there’s an earnestness and eagerness to the film that’s endearing, and the production design definitely provides a solid foundation, this is a stiff, rough, half-formed horror film that wants all of the trappings of found footage without any real sense of immediacy.
Arkar Soe Oo is Aung Khant, a tech-obsessed young man who’s just bought his 4K recording glasses and is eager to try them out. Fortunately, the perfect occasion has just arrived. His friend Thu Ya (Charlie Nyein) has inherited an old rubber plantation in the middle of an isolated forest, and since their friend group of half a dozen or so young people likes to take annual trips together, it seems like the perfect adventure. So the group piles into a bus and heads out to the woods, only to run into Thu Ya’s uncle (Kyaw Kyaw Bo), who warns them that supernatural interference might await them, and insists on tagging along.
Now, if the title didn’t give it away, the film opens with a Blair Witch-style declaration that what we’re about to see is the only evidence remaining of these friends and their trip. They went out into the woods, disappeared, and the footage is all that’s left. We know these young people are barreling toward their doom, and we’re left wondering not if it will happen, but how. That the film also opens with an increasingly disturbing montage of footage from other people’s 4K glasses only adds to the menace.
So we have a strong start, and despite a little meandering (we really don’t need to watch these people ride a bus for as long as we do), a promising story takes shape. Friends Mya (Lain Maw Tee) and Wa Na (Thiha Tin Aung Soe) are always whispering about rituals they found on the dark web that they may or may not have already done, while their friend Linn (Li Li Kyaw Khaing) had to bring her little brother (Phyo Khant) along for the ride, only to quickly lose him when they arrive in the woods.
Then there’s the witch (Mo Khum) who shows up in the woods, mumbling about a monster buried deep beneath the Earth while doing some very shady things in the name of reuniting with her own lost relative.
This is all solid stuff, and when you add in various shrines and candlelight altars placed strategically in the woods to conjure a folk horror vibe, you get something that feels quite ripe for a bonkers, gore-strewn ride. But that ride never comes, and to make matters worse, it isn’t replaced by anything narratively satisfying. There are several reasons for this, which I’ll try to unpack without spoiling anything, but unfortunately it begins with the subtitles.
I debated even bringing this up, because I do not speak Burmese and therefore cannot attest to the accuracy of the subtitles, but…something is off. The dialogue often arrives in sentence fragments, like a literal translation of another language rather than an adaptation to make the characters speak in complete thoughts. At one point, a character is frequently referred to as “Chris,” and I can’t figure out whether that’s a deliberate Anglicization of his name or simply an error. We were told before screening this film that the subtitles initially arrived unfinished as the film is still being finalized, so hopefully this is corrected by the time The Last Footage sees wider release.
Even with the subtitle issues in mind, though, the dialogue is an issue unto itself, in that it plays like a second screen experience you might find on a streaming service. Characters are constantly restating key bits of information, whether it’s a character’s dark past, bits of magical lore they’ve picked up on, or simple directions. Making sure an audience is keeping up with your story is one thing, but this feels like repetition to the point that it crowds out any actual attempt at character development. With a couple of exceptions, the sole character traits for these young people seem to be “They are friends,” which only adds to the frustration of the narrative. There’s very little chance to latch onto these people as people, something crucial to establishing the immediacy and tension of a found footage movie that’s hurtling toward a violent end.
Which brings us back around to the footage itself. Arkar Soe Oo definitely prepared for this film on a technical level, lighting and blocking things in such a way that the film works in long takes to build tension, and allows characters to take long walks out into the dark that genuinely conjure the feeling of something lurking out there.
The problem, of course, comes when you realize that the sole camera in the film is mounted to the eyes of the person wearing the glasses, so as a character, Aung Khant’s job is mostly to…well, just kinda look at stuff. Even in the film’s third act, when monstrous violence is happening around him, he just mostly stands and stares at it, maybe mumbling a plea for the horrors to end along the way. Of course, he has to do this because we wouldn’t have a movie if he didn’t, but the framing just makes it look like he’s a guy standing around waiting for his friends to die. There’s an interesting conversation to be had here about the way these smart glasses work, particularly as more and more news stories pop up about how people use that technology maliciously.
There’s also the philosophical concern of why someone like Aung Khant would want to record every single moment of this trip, from the mundane to the dramatic, a concern that many found footage films have thrived in. The answer seems to be “He likes gadgets,” and the rest of the characters just shrug about it. It’s dramatic meat left on the bone, and does the film no favors.
I wish I liked this film more, not just because it’s made by a group of people who seem genuinely out to do something new and open a new frontier of Asian horror, but because there really is something interesting lurking in all of this half-formed filmmaking. The Last Footage is a light that burns hot and fast, fizzling before the movie even really gets off the ground, and that’s a shame, because there are things in here that could’ve made it great.
The Last Footage made its world premiere at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info TBD.
