Paranormal Activity

Director: Oren Peli

Starring: Katie Featherstone, Micah Sloat

Synopsis:

Katie and Micah, blissfully in love and having recently moved in to their first house are finding themselves occasionally bothered by…well, odd night time occurrences. Things which sometimes disturb their sleep.

Micah decides to film and record what happens to them as they sleep using their PC and a night vision camera, to try to catch any weird stuff that happens on tape. Micah also buys a handheld camcorder to document their findings day by day.Things…happen.

Review:

Go and see Paranormal Activity and you will see a convincingly ‘real’ diary of a strange and terrible event in the life of a young couple, executed so well, so seamlessly that within minutes I was completely immersed, ‘there’ in this truly ordinary new build commuter house, on a truly bland ordinary suburban street on what seems to be the place where the ‘burbs appear to border a desolate big empty space.

This story actually depends on the sense of isolation created here. There is no bustling city outside the door, no flashing lights and noise and crowds to swallow up the loneliness and fear.

And it’s just such a simple story, as all the best fairy tales and scare stories are. There’s just this boy and this girl in their house in love, and….something that comes from outside, and that wishes to do harm. And us watching.

Silent and powerless.

It is easy when watching films of this type, to feel that some amount of film making artistry is left behind when principle characters are shooting the action with handhelds (apart from the static stuff in the bedroom.) and when the locations are pretty restricted.

Believe me when I write that this is not even close to being true. The Artistry in this film may not have it’s focus on elaborate set design and stunning locations, instead it has faultless set and production design and maintenance to create the reality of this domicile. It has two masterful performances from the two leads balancing the mundanity of life with the extremes of their encounters with the unknown entity. These performances are thorough and well composed and clearly well directed by someone with a strong vision and genuine skill at the job.

So the effects are minimal, but perfectly paced and administered. As a matter of fact, the lo fi nature of the effects serves to further strengthen the realism.

There are moments of touching humour and real human feeling peppered throughout this film, some of them courtesy of Mark Friedrichs as the Medium the couple consult for advice who comes in with all the unconvincing shallowness of a cut price classified ad charlatan but very quickly shows that he is the genuine article and not someone to ignore.

The film quickly establishes a pattern of daytime handheld diary footage of the couple reviewing and discussing the footage of the previous nights events, and the bedroom cam.

The bedroom cam. After about three nights of nerve shredding build up, trust me on this, you start feeling the dread before anything has even happened. As soon as you see the black and white screen and the counter in the corner it’s like ‘Oh no what’s gonna happen now?’ I viewed this with MikeOutWest and we agreed as soon as it finished that it was one of the most exhausting nerve jangling films we’d ever seen.

Verdict:

Hugely satisfying in every way. Brilliantly paced, well edited, utterly believable and very very scary.

8 out of 10 (Sulaco)

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