Review by Kit Rathenar
I went into British indie found-footage movie Hollow aware that it had previously managed to outrage my dear colleague Annie Riordan (read her review here), but hoping that I might have better luck with it. Maybe it would have more resonance for an English viewer. And indeed, at least I can’t fault its Brit credentials or the location, which is the gorgeous countryside around the Suffolk village of Dunwich; including a sinister tree, a ruined priory, and an assortment of cliffs, beach, fields and woods. For a shakycam flick, Hollow does do a surprisingly good job of showcasing its setting.
Into this rural idyll, enter the cast: Scott, a successful career asshole with a malicious sense of “fun”; his fiancee Emma, a bookish lass who should probably be in a convent just to protect her from her own taste in men; her awkward, geeky best friend James, who is apparently recovering from some kind of mental breakdown; and James’s new girlfriend Lynne, a single mum and party animal who’s more oblivious than ill-meaning. This odd quartet go to spend a weekend in the cottage that belonged to Emma’s dead grandfather, where they run into a legend about a creepy tree that’s supposedly haunted by a hooded figure and where an alarming number of young couples have hanged themselves. And of course someone decides they have to poke the ancient evil in the nose to see what happens, and from there… well, you know the drill.
While the cast are plausible and I did find myself sympathetic to them at least half the time, there’s almost too much realism to them and their interactions. An odd complaint, you might think, but characters who aren’t larger than life in any direction require really great direction to make them engaging, and Hollow bogs itself down by attempting profound human interest when it actually offers nothing that you couldn’t watch at a party or down the pub any night of the week. But it’s so determined to focus on the cast anyway that I’d almost think director Michael Axelgaard didn’t really want to make a horror movie at all. The horror elements here are formulaic, uninspired, and seem bolted on by rote to a film that’s actually trying to be a mildly depressing slice-of-life drama.
Hollow also spotlights the problem that found footage movies force a very specific affectation onto the cast. For the plot to be documented as required, somebody in the group has to accept the role of a maladapted misfit who can’t bear to switch off their camera no matter what’s going on. And the rest of the group have to allow this, instead of giving the offender a stern talking to/administering a swift beating/taking their camcorder and dropping it in the river, any of which might be a valid response to someone refusing to come out from behind their damn camera and interact with the rest of you like a human being. Hollow attempts a solution by having the characters dependent on the camera for a light source, and the light only functioning while the camera is recording – and James, in the aforementioned role of camera-waving sociopath, does sometimes outright lie to his friends about whether he’s filming or not – but the mere fact that such lengths were required highlights how pernicious a flaw of the genre this is.
But it’s the final twenty minutes or so that ultimately destroys this film. Not only does the climax portray all of the characters in an abysmally poor light – seeing two women argue for a good five minutes about whether the one man present should do something, without either of them once suggesting that they themselves could or should if he won’t, makes me want to spit nails – but the endless repetition of “let’s switch off the camera to save the battery”, only for it to promptly come back on again to capture another minute or so of pointless recrimination, is unendurable in all the wrong ways. By the close of the movie I was praying for the unknown evil to just hurry up and off everyone so I could go and get my dinner, and although I did get my wish, the ending is slipshod, relies on the crudest of jump scares and crying-women-mean-it’s-scary-honest cliche, and doesn’t even have the decency to be explicitly supernatural after all that. Weak everywhere it should be strong and without even the self-awareness to descend into redeeming trashiness, I can’t recommend this one.
Hollow is available on Region 2 DVD on 28th January, from Metrodome.