
A fascinating fact about horror films from around the globe is their unique angle of not making horror the main agenda. Indeed, a good scare is something that adds to the experience of watching films, as filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone) and J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage) have endeared themselves to horror aficionados by weaving splendid spine-chilling narratives in their films. Oddly, this pattern has in a larger sense not gained momentum in American features, with few exceptions like David Bruckner’s The Night House being one of those rare cases where the film described as scary turns out to have an entirely different agenda than one would expect.
With that in consideration, it would be fair to say that siblings Luke and Rachel Sommer have at least made a feeble attempt to do something different with their new movie, Cellphone. This is an ultra low-budge effort with all the bells and whistles to indicate it is a freaky flick about a mobile device that’s ‘gonna getcha’ directed by Luke from Rachel’s script but it is actually more about unhealed trauma than making people scream. However, that it can never make up its mind as to what it wishes to be is its weakness, and therefore the end result is a production that is bound to disappoint even the most optimistic of standards.
Wynne (Whitney Rose Pynn), who has recently lost her fiancé, takes on a new aim from her husband’s funeral and signs up to work at an abandoned countryside home thanks to her oddball employer (Malcolm McDowell, who appears only in photographs) in the movie She Will. Whenever Wynne speaks, it is on the phone either to McDowell or regretfully to an unseen figure who appears to be a mouthpiece for the receiver spouting out dramatic lines. It is not long before she first hears strange sounds in the dark, then spots moving silhouettes in the corridors, and finally, while conducting routine monitoring of her cell phone camera, sees distorted images such as in a nightmare that has no relation to the active surroundings.
All these events activate the grief she has not dealt with, and she begins interpreting the apparitions so much that she thinks it is her fiancé she is seeing and it has nothing to do with the ghost that is said to reside in the house. A prologue that sounds a bit shaky has prepared the audience for the fact that previous residents of the house suffered an unfortunate fate, making the quest of waiting through tedious round after round of conversations as a passive activity. Only after Wynne and a strange man (Justin Jackson) whom she finds looking for copper pipe in the next barn (don’t ask) What creates further interest in digging deeper do we find some answers and by that time, you will have wanted to hang it up a long time ago.
Cellphone carries with it an interesting premise, but the Sommers does not appear to be able to pick a narrative and stick with it for very long. The modest self produced movies benefits the film in that we can see it looks different but makes it even more apparent that there is no plot or substance to the film. Looking at the siblings’ work together may give an impression of some family commendable collaboration, what has been presented so far denotes the presence of constructive narration and the perspective to step back as far as needed to provide a thorough critique of their film. Every time I thought the film was reaching some emotional high that would certainly add to its overall quality, it would always be followed by such scenes that seemed to be incorporated from an entirely different movie/genre.
If Pynn were able to perform in a different script, with a different director, I would love to see what that Pynn could do. She isn’t the perfect speaker but seems to engage well with her cellphone, and yet, one never gets the impression that there is something within the character that would want to be found. Pynn does her best never to be dominant in the scenes with Jackson, an incredibly odd interloper, perhaps inserted with too much of Wonka’s magic. There is something in common between the two actors as well, Pynn and Jackson’s characters, but Sommers was not trying to achieve anything with such a powerful mixture of horror and mystery which seems to have a rather unimpressive pace.
Even regarding its average expectations, Cellphone is probably one of the most unambitious horror movies ever made. More than half of the target audience is likely to be disappointed with where the movie goes, especially with how there’s no substantial character development or an engaging, emotional core to focus on. Perhaps it would be advisable to watch a film created by a director who knows exactly how to scare an audience as well as earn both connections and emotions from the same film. Think of a cell phone as an unsolicited call from a telemarketer.
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