In short: Keep Watching (2017)

The Mitchell’s – father Carl (Ioan Gruffudd), daughter Jamie (Bella Thorne), son John (Chandler Riggs) and stepmom Nicole (Natalie Martinez) – are returning from a vacation to the family home. Things are a bit strained, for Jamie’s not able to get over her father “replacing” her dead mother with Nicole, while Nicole’s clearly trying to pretend she doesn’t notice, like a politician hoping all problems go away if you just ignore them for long enough.

There’s even more stuff of this sort in the first half hour or so, but little of it will matter much for the rest of the movie, mind you, for while the family have been away their house has been rigged with a truly improbable number of hidden cameras and microphones. We the audience already know the Mitchells are going to be the newest project of a gang of masked killers who like to get into fights with troubled rich families, and kidnap the last survivors for a not at all surprising plot twist, streaming their exploits time-delayed on the Internet.

At its core, Sean Carter’s Keep Watching is a perfectly fine low budget home invasion thriller that tries to avoid the class issues of the genre by keeping its killers truly faceless – apart from the one plot twist bit, of course. The hidden camera angle – even though it is nearly absurdly improbable without the bad guys actually having super powers of precognition – works out much better for the film than I would have assumed, pushing it into quite a few original set-ups for shots which also influence the suspense scenes enough they do not feel quite as well-trodden as the plot and the nature of the suspense actually is. The actors are selling the material well too, with some good shadowy looming by whoever plays the masked people, a much better performance by Thorne’s final girl than we got from her in the last two horror films I saw her in (though one was that Amityville abomination, so that one only a very cynical watcher would blame on the kid), and decent stuff by Riggs and Martinez too.


So most of the film is a tight, rather entertaining thrill ride that combines the bourgeois fear of home invasion with vague anxieties about the evil Internet and surveillance, and that’s really all I’d ask of a pleasant low budget number like this one. Alas, the film also adds some elements of psychological mind-fuckery concentrating on Jamie it does too little with to be effective, and which do not actually feed as well into the final plot twist as they should. As plot twists go, I’ve seen worse – at least it has something to do with the rest of the movie – but I’d also argue the plot twist and what is supposed to prepare for it don’t really do much at all for the effect of the film, instead regularly slowing it down for business that just isn’t as riveting as Keep Watching seems to think it is.

Mercy (2014)

Following a violent incident, young George’s (Chandler Riggs) beloved grandmother Mercy (Shirley Knight) has been brought into a care home for the elderly, because George, his brother Buddy (Joel Courtney), and his mother Rebecca (Frances O’Connor) live toe far away from the Appalachian family home to care for her.

Things have to change a year later, though, when various “incidents” get Mercy thrown out of the home. So, Rebecca and her sons move into the old family home Rebecca left (or is it fled?) when she was eighteen to take care of a Mercy who is barely more than a vegetable following a stroke, bad care by George’s uncle Lanning (Mark Duplass), and the dubious decision of the home to keep the old lady drugged up to the gills.

However, something just isn’t right at all with Mercy. Slowly, George unravels hints and suggestions of the family’s past - the curious suicide by axe of his grandfather, the honeymoon camping trip of his aunt that left her husband dead and hers raving mad, and the strangely two-faced nature of Mercy, whom George felt closer to than his own mother when she was still well, but who showed cruelty and perhaps even worse things towards others he never noticed when he was younger. So, it might not be the best idea when George replaces his grandma’s knock-out drugs with saline solution.

Peter Cornwell’s adaptation of a Stephen King story (with a bit of Lovecraftian terminology – though Mythos fans might be a bit perturbed by the curious choice of Mythos god for the function it has in the plot - as well as quite a bit more Appalachian folklore thrown in that reminded me of the way Manly Wade Wellman used these things) is a pleasantly straight-forward piece of horror, telling a simple story focussed on theme, mood, and character, and eschewing showiness for most of the film’s running time. It’s not at all what I would have expected from the director of Haunting in Connecticut, seeing as it lacks all the annoying trends I loathe most in contemporary mainstream horror – the fixation on loud noises, the useless jump scares and so on – opting for an emphasis on mood and characterisation instead, letting a fine acting ensemble, calm direction, and meaningful landscape shots do a lot of the work of creeping the audience out.

Cornwell’s direction isn’t without style,  but it’s a style used to emphasise the story and the film’s thematic interests in family and love as the cause of emotional turmoil as well as a safe haven from these things, and the point where both sides of the equation become ambiguous. With this approach Cornwell manages to sell even the more preposterous plot developments during the last third of the film, convincing at least this viewer to take on a bit of George’s still child-like view of reality. In this context, I also think it’s very much in the film’s favour – making it more convincing as well as more effective - how easily it manages to portray George as intelligent, resourceful – as well as in possession of an imaginary friend who just might be a dead girl or perhaps something a little different - yet really a child, with all the lack of direct power and agency as well as information about the more sordid parts of his family history this implies, making his situation all the worse because he really can’t expect anyone to believe the nature of what’s going on, nor be sure he has the information he should have to survive.

Once the proverbial shit hits the fan, Cornwell also shows himself to be quite adept at classic suspense techniques, as well as totally unafraid to show and do things that sound silly on paper but feel completely right for the world of the film, where everything that goes bump in the night truly exists: cursed books, evil powers of the outer dark, sin-hunting haints, pacts with horrid forces and ghosts are all part of the film’s world, without the whole affair ever feeling just a bit too much. There is, of course, an obvious parallel to fairy tales and a child’s view of the world, and who am I to disagree with a film that mixes these particular ways to look at and explain the world with a sober perspective on the horrors and pleasures of family and love, and the way these are all too often intermingled?

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