ERASMUS, it seems, refers to a program for students who are citizens of the EU to study in other countries and more. The official summary says it "is the EU's programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe. It has an estimated budget of 26.2 billion euros."
So, following a prologue depicting the murder of a British Erasmus student, this found footage movie documents the experiences of an international group of EU Erasmus students in Barcelona who go out together to party, booze and hook up, but end up facing mortal danger.
Barcelona seems to be a hot spot for found footage movies, since I know of several which are set there: REC (2007), REC 2 (2009) APARTMENT 143 (2011) and HOOKED UP (2013). All of these are much better and especially more fun than this movie.
There are two major problems:
First, the characters are very 2-dimensional, and most them are neither very likable nor memorable, despite the fact that the cast is unusually good-looking.
Second, during the action scenes it is hard to tell what is going on as many scenes are too dark, and combined with our detachment from the characters, this turns the hectic proceedings into a very uninvolving one, if not a complete mess. Because of that, the double twist at the end, which I presume was meant to surprise the audience, can at best elicit a shoulder shrug.
It is too bad because the movie had some things going for it: unlike most other found footage movies, which tend to reward sitting through a movie in slow burn mode with a few minutes of frantic action at the end, the pace picks up relatively early and doesn't let up. This is something I do appreciate.
Also, there is a lesson that in matters of love, mortal danger has tremendous power to clarify where one stands, but it gets wasted on characters about whom we don't care that much.
Altogether, this is a disappointing effort because it had the potential to be a top notch found footage horror film.
