Nobody records a podcast the way this movie records podcasts.
Nobody records for five minutes, calls it a day, and comes back tomorrow. Nobody reads Wikipedia at a co-host for four minutes and files it as an episode. Nobody hands a large-diaphragm condenser to a woman who then sets it down at the acoustic dead center of a house with hallways running in four directions over hardwood floors.
During lockdown, people recorded podcasts from the bottom bunk of a kid’s bed under a pile of blankets. People sat on the floor of coat closets. Evy has access to rooms that are already horrifying and would sound much better. She picks the worst spot in the house. Goddammit, if you’re going to make a movie about podcasting, make a movie about podcasting. This is me being insufferably pedantic, of course, but when the movie misses the setup of the environment so broadly, yikes… it’s just tough to stay with the story.
I never connected with Evy. It wasn’t all her microphone technique, certainly, but I kept waiting for the performance to pull me closer and it didn’t. Justin is only a voice and somehow felt more present to me. I thought a lot about Relic. That movie got me all the way inside an adult mother-daughter relationship under similar pressure. I wanted some of that feeling here.
I watched it in the dark with headphones on. Do that. The sound got me hard. Evy explains audio apophenia, hearing meaning in noise, and I spent the movie listening for meaning in every crack and murmur in the house. Sometimes I heard a voice. Sometimes I decided I had heard one. The movie wasn’t going to settle it for me. I was fully Skinamarinked.
The camera could stare into an empty hallway as long as it wanted. My headphones believed the hallway wasn’t empty.
The mirror shots got me every time. I would spend half a shot believing the camera was in the room with Evy. Then it would pan and, nope, mirror. The mother sitting up in bed as Evy shuts the door is buried deep in the frame and out of focus. I wasn’t sure I had seen her. I wanted to rewind immediately.
I also cannot shake the kitchen with the chairs on the ceiling. Evy notices only the running tap. The kettle is screaming. The cabinets are open. The furniture is over her head. She doesn’t react. Maybe the room looks fine to her. I have no idea. Good and awful.
Tommy brought up Ghostwatch. In both movies, the broadcast lets the haunting through. Undertone also buries a passage from Mark 5 in the recordings: Jairus’s daughter, the child is not dead but asleep. Evy cannot even establish whether her own mother has died. I don’t fully know what to do with that. It bothers me, so I’m keeping it.
Roy Lee executive produced this and The Ring, twenty-four years apart. Rachel needed two VCRs and a stranger willing to press play. Now all the cursed thing needs is an RSS feed.