Life of Belle

Life-of-Belle
Life of Belle

Taking cues from Paranormal Activity and Skinamarink, Life of Belle will be doing rounds on SCREAMBOX on May 17. This film is based on actual events where footage has been used to narrate the circumstances around a child’s missing case.

I shall take slight issue with this synopsis of Screambox such as how Life Of Belle has nothing to do with the film Skinamarink despite the fact that children are part of the movie. Oh, there’s a lot of Paranormal Activity here to be sure. But none of Skinamarink. Which is good. While I loved Skinamarink, the last thing I desire is movies trying to escape it without getting the point.

Life Of Belle is a family drama. Writer-director Shawn Robinson props up the family cast (Mother, Father, Belle, and Link) who go by the same last name Robinson. This is either the most hilarious coincidence in the history of mankind or a casting director went maverick or it is one way of showing someone has a talented family. I’ll Occa’s Razor it and assume it’s the last option there.

This movie can be defined as a found footage horror film because It outlines a family life after a young daughter decides to start a YouTube channel moments before her father leaves for a business trip and presents her with a camera. While the patriarch goes out on a business trip, the matriarch of the family makes the choice to discontinue her mental health treatment. She suffers from very vivid nightmares and hallucinations, but this is just a sample of her greater issues. Eventually, she seems to call every food item in the house toxic and goes on to impose eating restrictions on her kids, illustrating a series of abusive behaviors.

So now we are left with the distressing picture of two children, Belle and Link, trying to cope with their mother’s disturbing actions while all they want is to be kids. The children can be seen engaged in games and other activities while their home gets obliterated and into shambles. It slightly exemplifies how another movie I watched quite recently, The Florida Project, could be more horrifically themed.

+Wow, this movie does give you some edge-of-your-seat moments. It is quite informative to how Belle and Link\’s mother go gradually crazier when she stops taking her medicine. It does not start out this way; at first, during the night, she screams. Then she starts to scream at her kids, abuse them with these “games,” throw all the food out of the house, and generally be the scariest person a child can imagine.

But Belle and Link, or rather the children in such situations, who have ‘compassion’ and look after their abusive or mentally sick parents, are to be pitied. There are some people who don’t have to struggle like this. For a few, it gets worse. I had moments when I felt like jumping into my laptop screen, picking up those kids, and shoving them under my wing for safekeeping.

So anyway, if there were any sensitive topics that this film went over awkwardly, I would say it is the issue of emotional manipulation. It can become quite disturbing looking at the kids’ mother during the course of the movie, slowly changing.

+Life Of Belle runs for only seventy minutes, and I believe it is just the appropriate amount of time for the film. So, kudos to the writer and director Shawn Robinson for understanding how much movie they had and not dragging it for another twenty minutes to make it an hour and a half. There have been many cases of one-hour movies dragging themselves into 90-minute features. I was glad to have not witnessed that scenario unfold here. It really takes an able and up-and-coming talent to realize that you do not do that.

-Right at the beginning we get to know how the movie ends because it starts from the scene of a police officer who walks into the house and discovers the dead bodies of the family members inside. Quite frankly, that was something that I could have preferred to be without. Knowing how it was going to end was not something that I needed. If anything, that was the sort of thing that I wanted to see, and not actually know how it was going to be for almost every single person in the movie.

I fully understand the reasons for how found footage films can be structured, and in this one’s case, it is clear from the start that the within-the-film footage is “this is how we look for Belle”, but for me, it would have made sense to just start the movie at the point of Belle’s camera view and leave the conclusion in the first place.

-THIS DOWN IS AN ENORMOUS SPOILER FOR THE FINAL OF LIFE OF BELLE, SO JUMP DIRECTLY TO THE OVERALL SEGMENTS. Endings are always exciting. Great? Here we go: After approximately sixty-eight minutes of a touching story about an unfit mother suffering from some severe strange illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who is unable to take care of her kids, we come to the close gran finale just for the wow factor of getting to the dramatic climax. Wait a second, there’s something crazy and otherworldly going on after all! And, for me, that was a major, major letdown.

The story adequately engaged me as to whether the father would return home in time to prevent the mother from spinning out of control. What was happening I cared. It was gripping, and touching a solid read! And then, plain and simply, all of it “nope, here are some evil (or do we say ‘misguided’?) phantoms” that were extremely disappointing. I don’t know if that seemed to diminish the potentiality of mental health issues in the rest of the film or if I simply deemed it a pedestrian trope that made this attempt at a retake of Paranormal Activities a little comically pointless. But sitting and watching this film, I had hoped that the possibility of something supernatural would be dispelled, being only a red herring for the purposes of the ostensible at least not disappointing the audience at the very end.

As is often the case, I would not be too critical regarding the ending of Life Of Belle, because up to that point the picture really was a good ride, it simply was a very nicely done emotional roller coaster. The Robinson family all do a pretty decent job in their parts, albeit the scripting may not be at its most innovative all the time. I would certainly advise this, but boy I did not like the ending at all.

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