Why am I doing this again?

I don’t even want to find a better quality picture for this movie. Why did I subject myself to this? Why? Why must I suffer in an effort to find the best horror/Halloween movies? What was the point? Dear God, what was the point?!

Alright. Available on Hulu and directed by John Progue, this horror film bAsEd On TrUe EvEnTs (the Philip experiment of 1972, a likely terrible parapsychology experiment that I’m too brain-numb to even read about) is boring and bland. Like licking sawdust.

Side note: have I become invulnerable to scares? Am I now an Infallible Horror Movie Master? Maybe this movie will scare some people, but it barely held my attention, let alone stayed with me. If you’re reading this, drop me the horror movie that scares you the most so that I can get some feeling back in my life.

***unenthused spoilers***

TW for sexual abuse because that’s all the rage in horror, isn’t it? MAKE IT STOP.

I don’t even–I just–this movie made me so deflated, so defeated, that I didn’t want to write anything about it. I put it off for three days. Now, here I am, with a backlog of reviews and I am FORCING myself to THINK ABOUT THIS MOVIE again.

We’ve got Sam Claflin as a timid, nervous cameraman whose name I don’t care about but will look up for the sake of this review–it’s Brian (hi, Dad.) Brian is hired by a very unlikable professor named Coupland (Jared Harris) who surrounds himself by hot, young college students Krissi (Erin Richards) and Harry (Rory Fleck Byrne) as he experiments on Jane (Olivia Cooke) to try and “cure her mental illness.” Just, like, an umbrella cure for her unnamed mental illness. Kay.

Jane is apparently also college-aged but always wears loose, white clothes reminiscent of a night gown (maybe it is a night gown? I don’t want to go back and check; please don’t make me) that, paired with her creepy doll, Evey, and her long, unbrushed hair makes her look like a big child. It gets WORSEEEEEEEEE when viewers find that Jane has a ~mysterious background~ and has hopped around to different fosters homes until Dr. Coupland “saved” her. What does that mean? What does it mean?

Blah blah, after a bunch of back and forth shots between the camera crew and Brian’s shaky filming (which ran on much too long when it appeared and left a bad taste in my EYES), creepy stuff happens–but not enough to scare me. Jane is somehow attached to this entity, Evey, that sort of lives in/around her doll and makes stuff move or makes Jane start screaming randomly. Dr. Coupland thinks that Evey is a manifestation of Jane’s emotions, so Jane should be able to kick her out of existence. Do achieve that, he repeatedly tortures Jane–once burning her arm until it turned black, and keeping her locked in a room with one of those little windows that open from the outside so anyone could stare at her at any time (and they do and it’s WEIRD)–to try and get her to make Evey leave, I guess.

Somehow, after all that and a lot of yelling, Dr. Coupland still manages to have sex with young, blonde Krissi (who is actually in a thing with Harry, who is better than the doctor in every way imaginable). Why, Krissi? Coupland is just so unbelievably, unimaginably unlikable. I hated him. He didn’t even have any silver fox charm, for God’s sake. He was a creepy, controlling old guy who literally kept a girl locked in a remote house to torture her for science. Krissi–what?

AND THEN, after Krissi gets absolutely denied by Coupland, she spies the professor petting Jane’s head as she rests on his lap–relatively innocent, if we play into the idea that Jane sees the professor like a father, but gross gross GROSS given the facts that 1) he is abusing her, clearly, and 2) while Brian is filming Jane in the bathtub (again, WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?) she sits up and tries to expose her breasts to him, to which Brian quickly turns away with his camera, but then they talk about bad men who torture girls by wanting them and not taking them; when Brian asks if Coupland is one of those men, Jane doesn’t respond.

Second TW because I’m about to rant.

Excuse me for a moment but–I CAN SEE THAT THIS WAS WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO HAS NO IDEA THE KIND OF ACTUAL TORTURE FOSTER CHILDREN AND WOMEN OF ALL AGES GO THROUGH AT THE HANDS OF MEN; I CAN GUARANTEE THAT THIS TORTURE IS NOT BECAUSE THE GIRL WANTS THE MAN TO FOLLOW THROUGH–GUARANTEED!!!!–AND POSING JANE AS SOME SEX-OBSESSED, MENTALLY ILL HORROR CHILD-WOMAN IS GROTESQUE, BAD WRITING, AND SHOCK VALUE THAT AIN’T EVEN SHOCKING ANYMORE, so stop it.

Whew. I didn’t like anything about this movie. Ha! It sucked. The characterization was gross and papery, the story line was boooooring (did I even go into that? Jane is actually Evey, a vessel for a demon or something, and she accidentally (or was it on purpose?) killed her whole cult-family in a fire that she didn’t remember, then she caught herself on fire and left Brian as the only survivor, who was then blamed for the deaths of everyone), and the sexual undertones were so unwarranted and unnecessary. I don’t jive at ALL with movies written by, first things first, cis men who seem to have never dealt with sexual abuse or harassment in their lives but then try and make the scary, scary horror film where all the girls deal with creepy men! I’m tired of it! Stop it! I hate you!

That’s it. Don’t watch The Quiet Ones. Sam Claflin, you were better in The Hunger Games, my dude. Oh, and the CGI was bad.

BYE,

Abigail