La posesión de Molly

Molly (Gretchen Lodge) is a janitor who marries Tim (Johnny Lewis), a long distance truck driver. They move into her old family home, but since Tim is away a lot of the time, it leaves Molly alone with her unpleasant memories of her youth; obsessed with filming things, she comes to believe that there is some unholy, spectral presence in the house.

Commendably, Eduardo Sanchez, best known for "The Blair Witch Project", never dips his toes all the way into supernatural waters, preferring to leave us with an ambiguous take on a young woman losing her sanity and her health. This is also a young woman so deeply traumatized that it doesn't take much to send her over the edge. Indeed, she is a former junkie who is soon using once again. And Tim and Molly's sister Hannah (Alexandra Holden) are at their wits' end trying to cope with Molly's behaviour.

The film does keep visual effects to a bare minimum, but gives lovers of more visceral horror some good gore to enjoy. What "Lovely Molly" really is, is a good "slow burn" type of psychological horror film, the kind we don't get all that often in an era where genre cinema typically depends on jump scares. One of its main assets is the sound design, which Sanchez had perfected with BWP and a minimal budget. It's guaranteed to keep some viewers on edge. The other major point of interest is a gripping, bravura central performance by Lodge, who makes Molly sympathetic enough to sustain the films' 100 minute run time. But the acting from all of the principals is engaging, including Field Blauvelt as the genial Pastor Bobby.

Location shooting in Maryland, cinematography, production design, and music are all well done, but ultimately take a back seat to the journey undertaken by our haunted main character.

Seven out of 10.

I rarely criticise a movie for its technical choices rather than its script or character development. However, this instance stands out, as I find it necessary to commend the storyline for addressing some sensitive (and significant) subject matters but cannot and will not extend the same degree of appreciation to its execution on the broader level.

The mixed style, continuously oscillating between found footage and conventional cinematography was frustrating. A more decisive approach in selecting one particular style would have benefited the script I reckon.

Regarding the narrative, I was captivated by how it gradually builds tension while delving into darker themes. The darkness is pursued, not rushed into and it embraces it completely as we reach conclusion.

Incorporation of psychological trauma with a suggested entity of malevolence was a genuinely ingenious idea that could have yielded a superior outcome had it not been executed in such a technically as well as tonally convoluted way.

Before I finish I must specifically mention the performance of Gretchen Lodge in the lead role. She delivered an outstanding portrayal of a woman showing scars of past trauma and slowly descending into madness, which was quite impressive for a film of this scope and ambition.

LOVELY MOLLY is a BLAIR WITCH follow-up from director Eduardo Sanchez. In it, a newly wed couple movie back to the childhood home of the wife, only for her to start experiencing flashbacks and hallucinations as dark secrets from her past are dug back up again.

This is a slow burning, atmospheric horror film that unfortunately misses the mark too often for me. It doesn't help that the characters, particularly the protagonist, are too unlikeable for me to enjoy the movie. Everything about this is greyed out and downbeat, and the segments filmed found footage style are intrusive; with found footage it's all or nothing. The opening scene with the burglar alarm going off is the only one which is truly menacing.

The whole mysterious "secrets from the past" aspect of the storyline is an all-too-familiar one from a lot of modern horror movies and there's just too little incident here to attract my attention. Even worse, some of the stylistic choices are annoying in the extreme, such as the constant tinnitus-inducing ringing on the soundtrack. I appreciate what Sanchez was trying to do here but for me, it's a failure.

Her parents both dead, Molly (Gretchen Lodge) moves into her childhood home with trucker husband Tim (Johnny Lewis); but while Tim is away at work, Molly begins to experience terrifying occurrences that make her believe that she is being haunted by the spirit of her abusive father. As the terror mounts nightly, Molly—an ex-junkie—finds herself returning to her old habits for comfort...

Eduardo Sánchez's Lovely Molly begins with a close-up of a distraught Molly speaking directly to her video camera—a scene that directly references Heather Donahue's classic monologue from Sánchez's 1999 hit The Blair Witch Project; it's a rather amusing move by the director, one that blatantly acknowledges the similarities in technique and style between his new film and that with which he first made his name.

Thankfully, despite a very familiar feel to proceedings throughout (particularly thanks to a fair amount of shaky hand-held video footage), Lovely Molly does mark another level of progression for Sánchez as a film-maker: it is a technically superior piece to Blair Witch, the plot being far more complex and the production more polished, but more importantly, it sees the director using tricks developed on his first few films much more effectively, taking the terror to new heights.

Certainly for the first hour or so, Lovely Molly succeeds in being one of the scariest movies in a long while, Sánchez using his tried and trusted bag of tricks—creepy noises, impenetrable blackness, a well developed sense of vulnerability—to ramp up the tension to pant-wetting levels; he is aided in no small part by a fine central performance from Lodge (who is indeed very lovely!) and excellent sound design which adds immensely to the eerie atmosphere.

Sadly, the nearer the film approaches the end, the less it succeeds in chilling the spine: Sánchez slowly loses his grip on proceedings, with way too many plot details hurriedly brought into play, and the ambiguous nature of the narrative leading to utter confusion rather than fright. Ultimately, the viewer is left to question whether Molly has lost her mind or whether there really was a supernatural explanation for her behaviour. Reaching a satisfactory conclusion ain't easy.

8 out of 10 for the first hour; 5 out of 10 for the rest (an average of 6.5/10 by my calculations, which gets rounded up to a 7 for IMDb).

Director Eduardo Sánchez begins his newest spooky feature Lovely Molly with a deliberate shout out the the film that brung him here, The Blair Witch Project (co-directed with Daniel Myrick). A crying woman confesses into a videocamera, capturing herself in a moment of distress and hoping to leave a clue to be discovered after she inevitably succumbs to an off-screen terror. Sánchez hasn't returned exactly to his old stomping ground of first-person documentary horror - Lovely Molly is for the most part a spooky old fashioned psyche-out horror film - but it's a nice touch in a film filled with them.

Molly and new husband Tim (Gretchen Lodge and Johnny Lewis) are ripped from sleep in their new inherited home by a squalling alarm. Someone has opened their back door and is thumping around in the kitchen, but police find nothing out of the ordinary and chalk it up to the wind despite Tim's insistence that he locked the door.

He's a truck driver, and is away from home for stretches of time in which Molly is left alone to deal with a growing malignancy, a presence in the house that manifests itself as sung voices, crying children, clomping horse hooves and slamming doors. Molly's afraid to reach out to her sister or husband for help, fearing that they'll assume she's lapsed back into substance abuse. She instead begins to videotape her encounters, and it's this footage, as well as taped footage of someone stalking neighbours and visiting an odd underground shrine of some sort, that forms the frightening backbone of the film.

As Sánchez himself claimed in a post-screening q&a, the film is as much an "indie relationship" film and "actor's piece" as horror film. The entire weight of the film is on newcomer Lodge's back and she pulls the whole thing off dazzlingly well, transforming from a slight, trembling girl into a stalking, haunted and threatening woman crawling through an empty house. It's a performance good enough, combined with Sánchez's legitimate gift for crafting arresting moments of weird, totemic and animalistic horror, to transcend the film's kind of tired "is it a ghost or a hallucination" set-up, and take the whole thing into straight-up spooky, straight-up original territory.