FOUND FOOTAGE begins with a notice telling us that this is footage in the possession of a police within the context of a crime investigation. Then the movie proper begins.
Darius steals a camera from a store with the intent, stated shortly after, of documenting his daily life. It turns out he is a small-time drug dealer and stalker/serial killer and over the next hour and few minutes, we see a first-person perspective of his murder spree.
One one level, this is a well-executed found footage movie: it has an interesting premise, it is very gritty and realistic, and the actors involved do a good job.
The film directly puts us in the shoes of a profoundly evil person, and thereby generates a lot of unease. THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES (2007) did something very similar, but did not have as much violence. It is a testament to the latter movie that it could still be highly disturbing despite most violence taking place off-screen.
Not so in FOUND FOOTAGE: the serial killer fixates on attractive young women, having mapped out their daily routes-what he calls the "grand design" of their lives-and when it comes time to do the deed, which he does with a knife, the film forces the audience to witness the graphic murder almost as if it was doing it. Although those sequences are short, they are very disturbing.
In serial killer movies, part of the point of the film is to convey something about the kind of person the psychopath is. The best found footage serial killer movies, such as MAN BITES DOG (1992), THE MAGICIAN (2010)(another Aussie take on the subject), RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2012), CREEP(2014), and CREEP 2(2017) present us with fully fleshed-out characters, where we can gain some insight and learn something about extremes of the human condition.
I felt that Darius was incompletely fleshed out. What we learn about him is that he is a nihilist, something of a coward, as when he is confronted by a much larger neighbor, and that he reduces people to their grand designs. Also, that for someone who reduces people to abstract concepts, he is pretty good at pretending to have warm human emotions when it is required.
Okay, that is a good start, but by the end of the film I was still in the dark about who he really was. If nothing matters, why go through the bother of killing people?
There is a hint that his murders are motivated by feelings of sexual inadequacy (which would explain the knife) but it is never really explored.
The other problem is the lack of a real story. To be sure, there are events late in the movie which happen because they were set up earlier, but the film has almost something like an episodic feel to it, without much of a story arc. Actually, this ties into the character issue, since the best stories also reveal the characters.
So, after the movie abruptly ended, I still felt left hanging, having gone through a little over an hour of the unpleasant experience of putting myself in his shoes with little payoff. For some, the vicarious experience itself is the payoff, and if that describes you, by any means, see it. Just don't expect to learn much from it.
