a landmark film in that takes every poor convention of “found footage” films —truly lousy improv “acting”, 25 minutes of plotless footage showing nothing but two intensely boring people going about their day, digital effects we’ve seen a million times before (a guy is “scary” because one eye suddenly rolls up separately from the other, a woman has some sort of bug zipping around under her skin), cameras running in scenes when nobody would ever bother filming, like when they’re running from a demon, but somehow not capturing when characters are unconscious or have memory lapses, and of course stilted justifications for”always filming”—and somehow manages to make them worse than ever before: includes dream sequences and apparent flashbacks somehow captured by the camera, senseless nonlinear narrative and jump cuts between scenes with no explanation or reason. It seems like “found footage” has finally just gone from “here’s an idea where this filmed evidence gets left over” to nothing more than”We don’t want to pay a cameraman for our lousy movie, we’ll just have the actors hold the camera.”
