I’ll always look forward to seeing a James Wan film. After his successes with Saw (2004), Insidious (2010) and The Conjuring (2013) you bet I was looking forward to this one. The trailer looked interesting and from it, I would have placed this as a psychological thriller. Turns out it was more of a Supernatural Body Horror. On entry to our cinema screen, an usher told us that they had seen the film and that it was nothing like the trailer. Great. Unfortunately, this turned out to be correct.
Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis) is in a physically abusive relationship and this abuse leads to a miscarriage. Turns out this isn’t the first time this has happened. Yet this is the first time a supernatural entity has murdered her partner in apparent revenge.
Madison is clearly, and understandably, an unstable person. Throughout the film her hidden, supernatural past is revealed. I was kind of glad I saw this in the cinema, mainly because of a handful of moments where Maddison is transported to the scenes of some brutal murders. The CG blending of the two scenes is quite good. What was not good, unfortunately, is the acting. Very poor, tongue-in-cheek and gave a borderline B-Movie feel.
We’ve seen Anabelle Wallis in the Anabelle series (2014-2017) and even in the exceptional TV series Peaky Blinders (2013 – 2019) and she’s pretty good but as I’ve said countless times (especially in my review of Old (2021), if the script is poor, it’s very rare an actor can carry off a good performance.
Maddison had an imaginary friend as a child called Gabriel and it seems this ‘friend’ is manifesting itself in her adult life. Is this Gabriel the one committing these murders that she can see? Who or what is Gabriel?
The film was setting up a few twists and turns which we guessed pretty soon and realised that even the title of film lends itself to a spoiler. The action was decent and was well shot but the CG in certain fight scenes was lacking and nowhere near the quality of the transition scenes.
I wish I could say more but this is a spoiler free zone and saying anything more of worth other than ‘meh’ would be spoilers. I enjoyed the film, but this is one that you can wait to come out for streaming or purchase.
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