Evy records a late night horror podcast with her friend Justin. Apparently it's pretty popular. Given what the record of it in the movie, I can't imagine why. He gets emailed a strange file with 10 recordings from an email address he doesn't know that just says lol TENET. Justin, in his infinite wisdom, decides to listen to some of these random files instead of deleting them like a normal person. He realizes these are recordings of a couple and the woman is talking in her sleep. Evy is skeptical of course, and looking for logical answers. Over the course of listening to these recordings, they realize the couple, Jess and Mike, were pregnant during this haunting. Jess' sleep talking gets worse and worse and evolves into sleepwalking. Banging and noises and objects being moved happen in Evy's house as well. They keep hearing children's nursery rhymes played in the background and they realize there were messages encoded. Meanwhile, Evy is trying to take of her comatose mother. She's mute and unconscious at this point. She gets news that she's pregnant, however clearly has no desire to keep the baby. She doesn't think she'd be a good mother, and is thinking of abortion. During the podcast, Justin and Evy discover through hidden messages that Jess and Mike are being tormented by a demon named Abyzou. It's a demon that likes to induce miscarriages and torments unborn children. It possesses biblical iconography, which Evy has conveniently placed all around her home. Eventually this does all start to get to Evy and the hauntings in her own home grow worse. It culminates with the live broadcast of the last two audio recordings where it gets revealed from a caller that Mike and Jess are dead. They lived down the road from him, in Evy's town. While we don't get confirmation, it's heavily implied this is the home Evy currently resides in. There's more calls talking about the recordings and Abyzou before shit hits the fan. Evy admits she wasn't a very good daughter, hence her hesitation for being a mother. She gets chased around by horror cliches and the movie ends.
Let's get one thing out of the way-sound editing is great. This movie revolves mostly around audio, and you're going to want to be in a dark room, alone at night, or somewhere as quiet as possible. The cinematography also is firing on some good cylinders and the directing does a passable job. The movie is also edited pretty well outside of the sound editing too. There's a lot of prolonged seemingly pointless shots, but they do serve a purpose. At its best, it reminds me of Sinister. It's a very technical movie and that serves as it's biggest strength.
Acting is a bit of a mixed bag though, which is a problem when the movie has basically only 1 actor. Nina Kiri does an okay job, but I'd only call her passable at best and frankly, boring at worst. I don't think she's expressive or interesting enough to really carry a movie on her own. She does a decent job on the podcast, but whenever lines come about her, she never hits them. She comes off as wooden and stiff quite often whenever she's not recording the podcast. For the sake of fairness though, she has no one to play off of. It's just her in a house, alone with no one to talk to or gauge reactions against. Splurging for an actress more used to this might've been a better way to go. On the other end, Adam DiMarco plays Justin and while your mileage on him will vary, I don't like him. I find him annoying and insufferable and his voice is very mismatched for a horror podcast. Whenever he gets behind the microphone he reminds me a lot of Elijah Schaffer and when his voice is all we have to go off of, that's not a good thing. I think his voice comes off as very mismatched for this role he has to play. The writing does them no favors either. The dialogue is....well it's just not good. Considering the movie is filmed with just Evy and her comatose mother, and Justin's voice, this is baffling. How do you muck up dialogue for two people? Adam's delivery of these lines often comes off as confused, or out of his depth like he has no idea what he's doing. He sounds less like a person hosting a popular show and more like a kid on a Discord call.
Then there's the children song stuff....I'm sorry, but children songs are just not scary. I think a lot of it is due to poor line delivery by Justin's VA. He really sounds like he's a 30-something year old who just found out some nursery rhymes have dark origins. You could pick one nursery rhyme to harp on, but why all of them? Maybe you can sell me on Baa Baa Black Sheep, but London Bridge? Really? The writing just hits a lot of your standard horror cliches. Oooo, bumps in the night. Oooo, scary drawings. Oooo, motherhood! Oooo scary demon voice! It's just not very well conceived or conveyed in a good manner on script. That being said, you have to give a lot of praise to the cinematography. Whoever is behind the camera is trying his damn hardest to sell this to the audience.
Let's talk about the podcast, the basic premise of this movie. This was probably the most distracting part of the movie for me. I swear these writers never listened to a podcast before in their life. The dialogue plays like a podcast from 2012. It sounds less like a podcast and more like Bed Time Stories or Chilling Tales for Dark Nights. They basically film one episode, about 5-10 minutes per session about 3 times. So they get, MAYBE 30 minutes of content at best. He posts what they have that day and decide to a live session the following night. It comes off to me as a very clustered schedule. They record these at 3AM so when is Justin finding the time to post this, have it gain traction, and then do a Livestream the following night? Why Livestream it at all? The previous sessions were all interrupted by Evy getting haunted and leaving. Why chance that again? Who's listening to this Livestream at 3am? How do they have any callers at 3am? I don't really see why they didn't commit more time and effort to this bit.
I'm reminded of Late Night With The Devil (Which if you haven't seen, close KiwiFarms and fucking go see it right this very moment. No there is nothing more important you're doing right now.) which fully commits to its bit and I wish this had gone down a similar path. Or Sinister with the pacing of the videos. Both of which are better movies I'd rather be watching. It's not a bad flick, but it's many flaws hold it back from being great. I wanted to like this movie more than I did, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how dumb some things were and the more I had to say. This post started off pretty small, but kept bigger and bigger the more I thought about it. It got my attention enough to want to talk this much about it though and I guess you can call that a win. If you can avoid thinking about it, and watching it in a dark room, alone, you'll have a good time.
