The Entity (2015)
Directed by: Eduardo Schuldt
Written by: Eduardo Schuldt, Sandro Ventura
Starring: Carlos Casella, Daniella Mendoza, Rodrigo Falla
THE ENTITY (2015)
aka La Entidad
Directed by Eduardo Schuldt
A group of film students decide to focus on the subject of reaction videos for their media studies exam project. After watching a video of three teens reacting badly to an unknown video, they decide to reach out to the teens involved to find out what spooked them so. After discovering that each of the teens have died since creating the reaction video, the students decide to speak with one of the deceased’s brothers Santiago who knew a little about what his younger step-brother was up to. Taking the students to a cemetery, Santiago shows them a film reel which his step-brother and his friends watched before they die. Unable to watch it all, Santiago flees with fright and for good reason it would seem as the film students later witness Santiago dropping from the sky, his dead body torn and ripped as it splatters against the floor. Panicking, the students flee with the footage on their camera as they work out how to proceed but it seems the invisible entity that attacked and killed Santiago is now after them.
Peruvian hand-held horror THE ENTITY blends Ringu with found footage to bring a tale of terror that unfortunately slips into mediocrity five minutes into the movie. With camcorder footage of people wandering around graveyards at night with the sound of whispers in the darkness and the graveyard statues appearing to blink and move, I thought that we might be treated to a haunted statue movie. I was wrong. Instead we get a story about an old curse that plagues anyone who watches the film hidden in the archives at a local cemetery. Cue shadowy beings following and harming the teens as they, like others previously, refuse to believe the rumours and decide to take a look at the video for themselves.
There’s nothing really original or interesting about THE ENTITY. It feels like a blend of horrors we’ve seen before and beside from the odd jump scare, there’s nothing to get frightened about. There are a few decent gory scenes and the footage shown on the cursed reel of film is rather eerie but the rest is something you’d find in a mainstream horror, i.e. mild spookiness, screams and camera shakes that might send chills down a non-horror fan’s spine. For me, the main issue of the film besides the suffering script and screenplay is that it feels disjointed. It struggles to flow well and as we skip back and forth to different locations with various characters, it’s as though the story stops and starts, ruining any tension that could have been established.
As the end scenes roll in, it seems to pride itself on the journey to this point with a predictable conclusion that isn’t clever even if it thinks it is. The lack of depth, emotional engagement and true horror made it hard to invest in and therefore the end reveal fails to have the effect that it clearly hoped for. Apart from a few scenes of CGI used for great effect for the shadow creatures or turning the statues into living things, abeit briefly, THE ENTITY is nothing we’ve not already seen before.
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