Invoked begins with text that tells the audience that what they’re about to see is real evidence of a case that involves people going missing, and that the footage has not been altered in any way. This is almost always a bad sign nowadays, an indicator of a general lack of creativity in the post-Paranormal Activity era of found footage horror movies. It never really makes any sense, because the footage is clearly edited in the form of a feature film, featuring multiple angles from different sources cut together to make what ought to be a coherent narrative. The disclaimer is supposed to make things feel more real, but it usually offers the opposite effect.
The movie then jumps to a scene of Irish policemen investigating a scene. Here, again, Invoked displays a complete lack of original thought, starting the movie with the aftermath of the events rather than the beginning. It indicates that the screenwriters couldn’t find any clever ways to convey the fact that bad things were going to happen to the characters in the first act, so they spurn logic within their own milieu and set up a very contrived narrative construct, bookending the film with scenes from the present.
And then we meet the characters, who are a bunch of young people headed off on a trip to a hostel in a remote part of Ireland. The characters have names and relationships, but it hardly matters. They are interchangeable as far as the film goes, because nothing in their histories or personalities actually affects the outcome of the story. They instead spend time talking about the cameras that they’re bringing, because the film needs to establish yet again that this is all real. Never mind the fact that it hardly makes sense for these characters to be shooting, or that these cameras seem to be perpetually charged. But again, whatever.
It takes a while for a the movie to get to anything remotely scary. The film follows the characters as they drive, buy things at a store, talk idly about having sex and getting drunk. The action kicks off when they play a game that resembles Ouija with a glass and some pieces of paper. They actually manage to contact a spirit, and it seems that this particular ghost isn’t friendly. They freak out, but almost immediately forget about it. They get drunk. They have sex. They hang out at a dingy lake. It isn’t time for things to get scary yet.
Not that it ever gets scary. Not that the movie ever starts making sense. Not that anything in this movie ever becomes anything of value. People run around with their cameras, capturing video when all they should be doing is running for their lives. Even after seeing weird things happen, even after one of them gets injured, it just doesn’t occur to anyone to just pack up and leave. And so people they run around some more, the shooting method obscuring the complete lack of production value, and making things really difficult to watch.
It is amazing that a film like Invoked still exists. The found footage well ran dry a long time ago, with literally dozens of films completely sucking the life out of this particular method of shooting horror movies. But here it is, featuring all of the same elements that all the worst examples of the subgenre tend to feature. It is a film absolutely devoid of anything novel or original or interesting. It is yet another waste of theater space.
My Rating:
