The Beckoning (originally titled Beckoning the Butcher) is presented as a documentary detailing the mysterious disappearance of Chris Shaw (Damien E. Lipp), a guy who makes videos of himself trying out all manner of occult ritual. It combines interviews with family, police and paranormal experts with the footage of his trip to a house in a remote area of Victoria, Australia, where he and a bunch of his friends try out a rite called “Beckoning the Butcher,” which is meant to summon a paranormal entity into the world.
What plays out is pretty predictable, especially since the movie pretty much tells the audience right away that Chris Shaw ended up missing. And this fact by itself is not a bad thing. One necessarily goes into a horror movie knowing that the characters are going to end up in a bad way. The challenge, then, is to make the journey getting there interesting. And here lies the failure of The Beckoning. The form it takes actually makes the story much less interesting. It is already a pretty boring found footage movie. The documentary conceit only adds to the tedium, as it cuts away to “experts” explaining the boring stuff happening on screen.
The film doesn’t really do much to go beyond the basic set up of young people doing stupidly dangerous things in a remote location. There are traces of story here and there: there is some suggestion that the main character’s girlfriend isn’t too happy about his need to upload his life on the Internet, and some mention of the dangers of the deep web. But the movie doesn’t dwell on those details long enough for them to actually matter. It just isn’t interested enough in creating characters to turn those subplots into anything.
It all just falls back on the standards of found footage horror, which mostly involve characters sitting in the dark, talking about things that don’t really matter. It’s meant to come off as natural, but it never does. To the film’s credit, it seems to realize that it doesn’t always make sense for the characters to be filming, and has characters call out the illogic. But that doesn’t quite absolve the film from being unable to come up with justifications for having the camera on all the time, especially when it would make more sense to conserve battery, given that the cameras are also providing their only light source.
This would matter less if any of this were scary. But none of it is. It is just like every other found footage horror movie, where threats are obscured by the aesthetic. Shaky, blurry images stand in for the terrors the characters are meant to be facing. The added conceit of the documentary-style interviews make everything even less frightening, as the interviewees explain away the mystery of everything that’s going on. Bad acting on all sides of this picture compounds the problem.
The Beckoning is presented as a cautionary tale, with the serious interview segments warning the people watching to stay away from the occult. It is as if the film realizes that there’s very little that’s actually scary about its found footage. So it has these solemn looking people talking in muted tones about the seriousness of everything that’s going on. It is no cure to the basic problem of the movie, which yet another example of the laziness that has come to dominate the found footage genre. Found footage is a method, but in the hands of most filmmakers nowadays, it becomes an excuse.
My Rating:
