There’s always a sense of impending dread in a film from director Bryan Bertino. A sense that everything is not going to turn out all right in the end. It makes his films memorably darker but often a lot scarier.
Bertino is best known for the chilling home invasion film The Strangers, but if you can track down another exceptional film of his- Mockingbird– you can see how his films have a certain thematic fear factor: that the space we live in can sometimes become frighteningly unsafe. His other film- The Monster proved it wasn’t even safe to be driving in a car. This new film is about a sister (Marin Ireland) and brother (Michael Abbott Jr.) who return to their family’s sprawling Texas farm when their father takes a health turn for the worse. Their mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) is distracted and angry that they have arrived. “I told you not to come,” she repeatedly tells them, while their father lies comatose with a breathing tube in the bedroom. Then a terrible tragedy occurs and the brother finds a diary of their mother’s where she speaks of a malevolent presence that has invaded the farm and torments her. A caregiver who watches the father during the day speaks of how weird the mother had gotten as of late. Soon enough, Louise and Michael begin to suffer horrifying hallucinations and are woken in the night to unnatural howling in the distance and weird occurrences. A strange priest (Xander Berkeley) shows up to warn the siblings that whatever demonic entity their mother was fearful of, “He’s already here.”
What Bertino does so well is to visually set the stage (the cinematography by Tristan Nyby is hauntingly evocative). He insidiously creeps you out in intervals, until just the sight of an open front door or a bedroom light mysteriously switched on in the dead of night causes the viewer more and more unease. Then he goes in for the kill. A genuinely frightening movie.
In Theaters, On Digital and On Demand November 6th.