Discarnate

The fact that I had never heard about the 2018 horror movie "Discarnate" hardly mattered in my choice to sit down and watch the movie. It being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen, much less actually heard about, was sufficient enough to make me sit down and give the movie a fair chance.

Writers Mario Miscione and Marcella Ochoa put together a fair enough script, but I have to admit that for a horror movie then it just wasn't particularly outstanding. Sure, it was a watchable and enjoyable enough movie, but it just failed to stand out among so many other horror movies.

There were a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, such as Thomas Kretschmann, Nadine Velazquez and Josh Stewart. I will say that the acting performances in the movie were definitely good.

The effects in "Discarnate" were good, and that definitely added something to the overall enjoyment of the movie.

Watchable, sure, but ultimately it was a generic and forgettable horror experience. The movie's cover, however, was far more interesting than what the movie turned out to be.

My rating of director Mario Sorrenti's 2018 horror movie "Discarnate" lands on a bland five out of ten stars.

There is an outstanding idea at the heart of this film, and somebody gave it considerable thought. The creature itself is well realised and makes more sense than most, although the human characters less so. Supposed scientists undertake an experiment in the least appropriate place possible, with far too many variables - human and rat subjects simultaneously, inconsistent dosage, possible magnetic forces giving false results.

The characters themselves are stereotypes: the head scientist with a tragic past; the hipster female assistant with flawed beliefs (Norse mythology as from an 'isolated culture', when Norse travellers had found Canada half a millennium before anyone else, so knew more of the planet than anybody else); the beautiful but otherworldly spiritualist; the chalk and cheese brothers. I only knew three of the actors. Two were in Hostel 3, the other I recognised but had to look him up - he was the guy from The Collector / Collection.

The story is largely told through dream logic, a mixture of reality and fantasy. There are distorted perspectives, warped timescales, paranoia, shadows and light. The director of photography deserves a paragraph of their own, so here goes.

The camerawork is outstanding for a film with this budget. Terrific use of backlighting to place characters in silhouette, a superb use of colour in various scenes, and believable nighttime activity. Many scenes are almost monochrome but far from black and white. I vividly recall a scene all in brown but for the blue shirt of a character, another vista in a blue wash but for the blood on a victims face. I watched the film at night and was impressed at how much I could see in the darker episodes, but even rewatching by day with the curtains open it was clear the lighting picked out everything relevant but added deep shadows to blur the irrelevant backgrounds and create menace. I have not researched it but I imagine the cinematographer grew up in music videos or making commercials. In one scene close to the end, backlighting makes a male character seem perhaps more excited than he should be, but overall the lighting and camerawork is outstanding, far better than the film deserves.

The makers credit the viewer with intelligence. Hitchcock' definition of suspense was when the audience knows things they desperately want the characters to realise, and this is brave enough to show us the history of the house from the opening scene, although the researchers do not find out until very late. Echoes of The Thing when everyone knows they are dealing with a creature that can appear as one of them; the paranoia is palpable.

The flaws are in the lack of a coherent plot. One brother looks for another, questioning why he would go into a greenhouse when there is absolutely nothing to indicate he has. The other brother then looks for the first brother in the same outbuilding. The ridiculous lack of science shown by scientists is an almost insurmountable disappointment but don't let that put you off. There is so much to praise about this film, right up to the credits rolling, that it would be a shame to dismiss it. Done right, this could easily have been an all-time great.

This movie was a lot better than what I was expecting from the trailer. It has a lower budget but it's by no means "low budget" and there's some really awesome monster effects here. In fact one of the best most original looking monsters I've seen in awhile.

This movie centers around an experiment into the supernatural. In the first several minutes of the film a mans son is suddenly abducted right from his arms by an unseen force and vanishes into the woods. Time jump several years forward and the father is now part of a team exploring the supernatural. He encounters a woman who has a recipe for a tea passed down to her by her grandmother that allows people to see into this supernatural realm through their dreams. They manage to refine this tea into an inject-able serum with far stronger and unforeseen affects. The walls between our dimension and the supernatural begin to fall down exposing the team to all manner of otherworldly events and dangers.

Anything more than that would be a spoiler. Unlike the one of the other reviewers I didn't find this film confusing at all, in fact there are several moments where the events are being very clearly explained and the movie does come to a logical conclusion.

Overall a movie that kept my attention the entire way through, had very decent special effects, strong cast, good camera work, and while not an entirely original story a well fleshed out one. For the horror genre I'd give it a 7.

Edited: I think the people hating on this movie so hard must be too stupid to follow a basic plot. They literally explain what's going on through specific reveals as the movie unfolds. This wasn't a complicated movie, but the people saying this is the worst movie ever or that these are fake reviews are morons.

This is one of the absolute worst movies I've seen. People doing an experiment travel to an isolated house. They each take the drug that is developed and then goes off doing their own thing. Very scientific!! The only known actress is scantily clad to lure in that demographic... So many things wrong here!! Avoid!!

This is rated and reviewed as if it were just another throwaway horror film, and it really isn't, so I had to jump in and give my two cents.

Right from the start, the film looks and feels professional and interesting, so with the production values and actors who are, with one exception, engaging and believable, it's easy enough to suspend disbelief and overlook some leaps in logic, small plot holes, and the aforementioned badly miscast actress, and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

There isn't enough gore for diehards, but there is a decent amount of creepy creature features (and a lot of vomiting for no particular reason), so give it a try, it's still much better than it should have been.