Does anyone remember when ghost stories didn’t use the found-footage idea? Those were happy, innocent days, weren’t they? Now, it seems to be the go-to style for the genre, and that shouldn’t be a bad thing necessarily. That fact that it so often is is just an unfortunate coincidence.

Like so many movies recently, this takes the format of the recordings made by a group of paranormal investigators who are recording their time in a haunted house. At least this time, it isn’t an abandoned hospital / asylum, but a rather ordinary Los Angeles apartment, where recently-widowed Alan Whites (Kai Lenox) lives with his impossibly stroppy teenage daughter Caitlin (Gia Mantagna) and four year old son, and where strange and threatening supernatural occurrences seem to be taking place. The team of Dr Hazer (Michael O’Keefe), Ellen (Fiona Glascott) and Paul Rick Gonzalez turn up to record the phenomena and try to explain it, and inevitably, all hell (eventually) breaks loose.

There’s a lot of sound and fury here, but it ultimately signifies nothing. Instead, we get a lot of pseudo-psychological mumbo jumbo, assorted red herrings and a bunch of unconvincing characters who spend most of their time talking, with the occasional shock thrown in to stop the viewer from nodding off. The final part of the film turns into a tale of possession and is certainly frantic, but a noisy soundtrack and a generic ‘girl suspended in mid air as stuff flies around her’ shot is not enough to stop you realising that you’ve seen all this before, in much better films. The final shot is a cheap shock that is more likely to induce titters of ridicule than the intended screams of horror.

DAVID FLINT

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