Rated: MA15+
Written and Directed by: The Pierce Brothers (Brett Pierce, Drew Pierce)
Produced by: Chang Tseng, Ed Polgardy
Music Composed by: Devin Burrows
Starring: John-Paul Howard, Piper Curda, Zarah Mahler, Azie Tesfai, Kevin Bigley, Blane Crockarell, Jamison Jones.
‘Can’t be lost if we don’t know where we’re going in the first place.’
Opening 35 years ago to a teen girl going to a house to babysit, it’s all pop music and the 80s. Until she walks down the stairs to the basement…
Fast forward to five days ago and we meet 17-year-old Ben (John-Paul Howard) on his way to visit his dad (Jamison Jones).
Ben’s got a broken arm, his parents are getting divorced and the local kids are mean. Except Mallory (Piper Curda) – she has a crush.
It’s all a bit teen, even to the spying on the next-door neighbours when they’re about to get it on.
But horrors and teen dramas can be a good mix if the right characters get killed off and the monster’s scary enough.
Enter, the Dark Mother. A monster of the forest that feeds on the ‘forgotten’, AKA: eats kids.
‘Mum’s acting weird,’ says young next-door neighbour Dillon (Blane Crockarell).
And quite rightly so as the Dark Mother takes possession, creaking, stinking, her flesh rotting, her whispers making ears bleed.
I just didn’t find this Dark Mother particularly scary.
There’s an overreliance on the soundtrack with no real back story to this monster.
The Pierce Brothers (Brett Pierce, Drew Pierce) were inspired by Roald Dahl’s The Witches and the experience of living through their parents’ divorce. “We cobbled together our favorite aspects of Black Annis, an English legend, and the Boo Hag of the Appalachian Mountains and fused it with our own creepy concepts.”
But the idea behind the monster doesn’t translate. Adding some history into the film would have given the Dark Mother more meaning, giving the scares more meat. Instead, she’s a mystery in the film, where all Ben can figure is that it exists.
But it’s not all bad.
The story itself has some twists, and the pacing of the drama is just right.
The dad character adds a playful tone to the otherwise taking-life-way-too-seriously son, Ben:
‘The TV doesn’t have a HDMI port,’ says Ben.
The Dad replies, ‘Did you plug it in?’
Yet there’s no circling back to that 35 years ago beginning of the film, so why start there?
The film lived out its own journey of, can’t be lost if it doesn’t know where it’s going…
All the symbolism was there but then the narrative got too caught up in the teen drama so the drama was better executed than the horror of the dark monster.
Certainly not the worst horror I’ve seen but the few moments of, OK, that just happened, didn’t lift the tension to any genuine scares.