day 17. movie 12. the bay
put this on my list after reading
avengers23's review of it and reading a synopsis. i will readily admit that found footage movies kind of have an "in" with me. i'm a sucker for documentary/handycam/home movie type stuff; i think moreso because of the
potential it has for immediacy and audience immersion. as we all know, it is too often used as a crutch or a gimmick where the format does most of the heavy lifting in an otherwise completely dull film.
add to this the setting of a small town in Maryland (my home state, although the film was actually shot in South Carolina, these types of places all have a similar east coast charm), and you have what is a promising recipe for scares.
what i got was the goddamn heebie-jeebies for really no reason, given the film's content. there is no centralized killer per se, nor any one specific "thing" that
the bay utilizes to really be horrific; there's just a kind of looming dread that persists throughout. many horror films (regardless of sub-genre) have "that moment" where the setup and plot building gives way to the foward momentum of the story and the film settles into a rhythm or a groove until the credits.
the bay doesn't really do this as it attempts to stitch together a lot of narrative threads which develop at different speeds as the events unfold (some stories reach their climax well before others). there's just the realization that while you've been "waiting for something to happen" that it's been happening the entire time and you're only there to watch everything fall apart.
the ecological disaster message is a laid on a little thick, and the science behind why the residents of Claridge, Maryland are vomiting blood, breaking out in disgusting rashes and eventually dropping dead over a matter of hours is...fuzzy at best, but the film makes a genuine effort (it's at least several levels above 'swamp gas from venus').
the acting is all over the map. the narrator is either a terrible actress, or was attempting to adopt the tone of a trauma victim, emotionally detached from their experience. a few other players fall just as flat, but for me, their involvement becomes secondary to the events themselves. they are just moderately boring people in an incredibly interesting and terrifying situation. there's as much good as there is bad, i suppose.
my biggest complaint was the film's structure itself. as a found footage movie it skirts the whole "how did this footage even survive?" question handily. the problem is that, the filmmakers seem to rely on the "everything is from a camera somewhere" motif too heavily. there's a few shots in the movie that seem too convenient (multiple angles of an event) or inexplicable (a low angle shot of the town's main street made to look as it's from a security camera that's....3 feet off the ground and in the middle of the road?) but like the poor acting, i was able to look past these for the most part. there's also the issue of a musical score. the film is presented as a documentary comprising recovered footage, so i can understand the addition of a musical score, but for me, it was unnecessary and only served to put a barrier between me and the 'reality' of the footage i was watching. i think many of the film's best moments are without artificial sound; one particular scene involving the police and a sick person's home was especially disturbing, and relies almost entirely on in-camera audio.
so, maybe i'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, and i can readily see how the film's flaws might prove too much for some viewers but i'm sitting here looking over my shoulder with the lights on because of a film ostensibly about pollution. this is my favorite film so far of this year's marathon.
★★★★☆
good for: plausibility of setting, slow burn without overt horror moments, creep-factor, disturbing scenes
bad for: acting is hit and miss, subplots that don't go anywhere, unnecessary musical score
