| REVIEW | Ryan Morrissey-Smith
- Director: Sam Freeman
- Writer: Sam Freeman
- Stars: Rebi Paganini, Dennis Puglisi, Ryder Freeman
On April 4, 2022 a couple went camping in the Pinelands National Reserve. Without their knowledge, their phones mysteriously began recording, capturing broken audio and video of the events that followed. This is the blurb that precedes Don’t Look In The Dark. With that the film immediately solves the problem that most found footage films have, which is when shit gets hectic why do people keep filming? Unfortunately, it makes the film an endurance test of just how much partial and jerky camera movements you can watch before the conceit of the film isn’t enough.
Golan (Puglisi) and his pregnant wife; Maya (Paganini) are hiking a trail that Maya went on as a child, to honour her deceased father. Maya believes that she sees a young child in the trees and decides to go and see if the child needs help. Of course, she finds nothing but keeps hearing the child’s voice in the distance Golan has neither seen no heard the child. After a chaotic and fruitless search, the couple are now lost. Their think that they are walking round in circles, with a large tree being the one landmark they recognise, but every time that come back to the tree, there is a large and deep hole, that gets bigger every time they come back to the tree. Maya feels a irresistible need to climb into the hole, whilst Golan seems wary of everything.
Due to the nature of the footage captured on the phones, the turns somewhat into an audio play, because when you can’t see what is happening, you will always hear the couple. Their bickering certainly wears out its welcome early on, and then there is a cycle of being injured, panicked and then that gets repeated throughout the film making the short 70 minute runtime seem a lot longer. However, this doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t have some very effective sequences, some of the audio is really interesting when it becomes distorted or when you see flashes of something caught by the camera.
Don’t Look In The Dark is yet another way that filmmakers are still trying new things with the sub genre. Freeman has come up with great hook for the fim and the film itself is very well made and put together. Some of it really didn’t work for me but that may not be the case for you. Found footage horror is a very personal choice, mainly because what scares us is so different from person to person. For found footage fans, Don’t Look In The Dark will be worth a look.
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