Anguish

I'm about to fall asleep! This is boring and not all that good. Definitely not scary.

I like slowburning horror movies. I like when the tension is constantly built up until you can't take it anymore. When subtle fears are highlighted instead of jump scares. That sort of thing I like. But there's a difference between a movie being slow paced and a movie being no-paced. Anguish is the latter.

It's exhaustingly boring. It's basically a possession story about someone else's spirit trapped inside a girl's body and the movie revolves around her and her mother coping with it. And I appreciate what it's trying to do, focusing on the psychological angle as opposed to straight up scares. The problem is it misses the mark completely. There are chunks of this movie where absolutely nothing happens. Tess sitting down and looking at something, next scene, Tess walking around aimlessly, next scene, Tess sitting somewhere else, etc. It tries to build tension when there's no tension to be built. You're just waiting for something to happen - anything - and it never does. It even has the generic "inspired by true events" and perfunctory statistics before the movie starts, trying to excuse itself from the horridity, but it doesn't work. The music is frustrating, too. Going back and forth from bland indie acoustic songs to excruciating violins and of course the LOUD noises for when you're supposed to be scared. It's just annoying and frankly insulting to the audience.

The only redeemable part of Anguish is the acting. It's surprisingly good, especially when the actors have to recite dialogue this terrible, so good on them. But in every other conceivable way, Anguish is an empty shell of a movie. The only thing it ensures is the anguish knowing you could have spent an hour and a half doing something better with your life.

"Horror" is a well selling label, which is the reason, why many ambitious movies are labeled as horror movies despite being nothing like that - this old curse also hits "Anguish" and makes it being seen mostly by an audience, who will not take this slow little indie movie as a pleasure but will rather be disappointed.

I don't want to hide that I am part of just this audience.

Looking for a small, chilling ghost / possession movie I stumbled about "Anguish" with little to no expectations and no idea about what the movie will be in detail.

Starting the movie, I was immediately annoyed by "Lucy", but well, things take a certain turn here...late, we are introduced to "Tess", who, in all honesty, is at least as annoying as Lucy, if not more. I see what the directors tried - they wanted to paint an introverted, troubled character, but I am not sure if this wouldn't have played out better if they didn't try to show an annoying teenager but a sensitive, unusually calm kid or something...but well.

The story basically is about a girl, that gets possessed by the spirit of another girl - without spoilers, if you read my review this far, you can probably figure out who gets possessed by whom.

If you expect a possession horror movie, some exorcism, creepy stuff, moving things and whatever there might be out there in the huge horror movie portfolio, than forget that. "Anguish" is 95 % very low paced drama about how the mothers cope with the situation - the girl(s) is/are surprisingly unsurprised (no pun intended) by the situation. I mean, hey, getting possessed by some dead girl is pretty refreshing if you live in a boring small town, eh?

So, that's it. Basically nothing more happens during the entire movie. Two annoying girls, two a very little bit less annoying mothers, and some drama about why things have to be this way, until the movie finals in a, well, it's not even a twist, I'd say it's the end you will expect from minute one, if you ever have seen any horror movie, despite the fact "Anguish" isn't such.

I can give some points for the fairly nice soundtrack, the okay acting of the female lead girl, the atmosphere and the one scene, that gets supernatural finally (even though this scene does not make any sense at all - they just wanted to have it in the movie for showing off some shift/tilt effects, I assume). The result of this scene finals in the mentioned "twist" and does not match with the scene. At all. I'd basically describe that as a continuity mistake.

So, can I recommend? For my personal taste, I can not, unfortunately. I appreciate the efforts of independent film makers, and I understand they tried to mix up rather suspense than horror with drama elements. And hey, I can be fan of this - Carrie, Babadook and others show that this walk on a red line can be done. Anguish fails to place itself amongst those examples and can thus not be recommended - at least not if you have to pay for it. If your preferred VoD portal has it offered for free, you can take a look.

"Anguish" is a low-budget film labeled as horror genre but it is indeed a dramatic supernatural story of possession. After the unexpected death of the teenager Lucy hit by a car on the road, the newcomer in town Tess, who suffers from mental disorder, is possessed by Lucy´s strong spirit that is reluctant to move on. The performances are good, but the pace is too slow and disappoints the fans of horror. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

Saw on a lost of recent horror and knew nothing about. Had to give it a try.

"Was it interesting?" The story was far from typical. While most of the time that can be good, in this case most of the plot details were ambiguous.

1.5 out of 3 "Was it memorable?" The acting was about as flat and boring as the environment for most of it.

1 out of 3 "Was it entertaining?" While a lot of bad horror has characters that you either want to die or don't care if they live, this movie had characters I never thought they were in any danger.

1 out of 3 Starting with 1 (so that ghost in my head will stop telling me to), 1 + 1.5 + 1 + 1 = 4.5 This is a 4 simply for not portraying any real threat, either to the characters or to me. This was too independent and artistic to be scary or enjoyable.