Film Review: Paranormal Activity (15) ****
Nov 27 2009 by Graham Young, Birmingham Mail
Anyone planning to consummate a relationship after a night out at the movies should avoid this modern classic at all costs – it could only end in tears!
Shot for less than the price of a new supermini, this supernatural horror movie has taken the US by storm, turning an initial $11,000 investment into more than $100,000,000 of box office gold.
How’s that for enterprise – and how did writer director Oren Peli do it?
Quite simply, he trusted his own gut instinct.
And then kept everything pared down to the bare minimum from the set to the cast, script, plot and music.
Expensively assembled special effects teams will be the most scared when they see this film, because Paranormal Activity proves that directors don’t need them to be startlingly effective. Most of the action is set in the bedroom of Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat.
Katie has been seeing and hearing things, so Micah sets up a decent video camera linked by firewire to his computer.
That way he can keep recording and recording and recording.
For several nights during September and October in 2006, his camera records their attempts to sleep beneath (clever touch, this) a single sheet. Paranormal Sacktivity, if you like.
The results become genuinely unnerving.
Feel your palms begin to sweat out of sheer expectation.
On second thoughts, make that fear expectation.
As the clock ticks, Peli keeps a tight rein on the plot’s development to ensure that less is more.
Given that the psychological thriller industry has worried far more about the psycho than the logical for too long now, this will also hopefully help to prevent Hollywood from ever again releasing a movie as dumb and noisily over-the-top as the Sam Raimi-produced Boogeyman (2005).
Featherston’s appearance slowly deteriorates with the stress that she’s under, yet she’s always the proverbial ‘girl next door’, not a Hollywood star trying to act scared.
Meanwhile, Micah’s manly practicality gives the cleverly-imprisoning script full credence.
I felt my neck hairs rising at least three times, making this the best chiller since the Spanish films [Rec] (18) and The Orphanage (15) were, coincidentally, certified by the BBFC on the same January day last year.
Because of the handheld nature of Paranormal Activity and its spectacular profitability, comparisons have inevitably been made with The Blair Witch Project.
But this is much the better film, right down to the way it handles the industry’s tradition for opening and closing credits.
It just lacks the sort of extraordinary ending which certainly made Right At Your Door (2006) compensate for the fact that debut writer-director Chris Gorak had over-edited his own footage after ill-developing his characters at the beginning.
