Review by Tristan Bishop
Well, found footage films are still being made. In the past few years I’ve watched literally dozens of these films, and whilst there is the occasionally effective entry (The Tunnel (2011), for instance), most of the cycle ranges in quality from ‘dull’ to ‘execrable’. Found footage has, as I have discussed on Brutal As Hell before, an obvious attraction to first-time film-makers, being extremely cheap to shoot, and of course horror films have always been considered an effective calling card to the film industry. But now we have even ‘name’ directors like Barry Levinson (The passable The Bay (2012)) and Renny Harlin (The disappointing The Dyatlov Pass Incident/Devil’s Pass (2013)) getting in on the act, and bringing medium-sized budgets with them, so the first-timers should be having to rely more on ideas and atmosphere to make an impression. This doesn’t seem to stem the flow of utter rubbish being passed off to us horror addicts, though, as films as awful as A Night In The Woods (2011) and The Sigil (2012) are still gracing our shelves, so someone MUST be buying/renting this stuff? Possibly when they find out that all the copies of Paranormal Activity 4 at Blockbuster are on rent? So, let’s find out if Daylight (a film with not one, but THREE first feature directors onboard) can bring anything new to the table.
We are given a short, amateur documentary-style intro and told that what we are about to see is two ‘unedited’ tapes which were discovered by the police. We are then shown recordings of a Child Protection Service team investigating claims of abuse at a school. They interview various schoolmates and teachers of a 14 year old (played by Jeanine Cameron, who I would guess is a good few years older in real life) who has been found with bruises, but who is otherwise foul-mouthed and uncooperative. All suspicions seem to point towards the local priest (played by Patrick Andersen), who is plagued by rumours of unpunished transgressions involving vulnerable children. However, as the team digs deeper into the mystery they find that the case may well be something more terrifying than they originally imagined. Could they in fact have uncovered a real case of demonic possession?
Well, where can I start? In the interests of fairness I’ll praise the talents of child actor Sydney Morris, who plays the pivotal part of Sydney Irons in a natural, convincing way. In fact, she out-acts every single other person in this production – the performances range on a sliding scale from disinterested to outright groan-worthy (Jeanine Cameron, who is given embarrassingly lurid dialogue to spout, and fails to convince completely). The script really doesn’t help either – it’s leaden, dull stuff, devoid of any humour or colour, and, with the child abuse theme, slightly distasteful too. The worst crime, however, is the way the film approaches the second tape – we go from a fairly straight-forward (if uninvolving) narrative to what amounts to a student cut & paste experiment. To be fair, the second half of the film does contain one or two interesting ideas – one specific reveal is actually rather good, but is lost in the ultimately confusing montage of sequences.
One really does wonder what the film-makers were doing here – was it an attempt to try something new and disturbing? Breaking down the usual narrative structure into a collage of bits culled from various sources? Quite possibly, but it fails to disturb, coming off as both confused and confusing – like the worst elements of David Lynch without Lynch’s ear and eye for the truly surreal, leaving one to wonder whether the film-makers looked at what they had, and then decided to make the film more interesting by re-shaping it into something more ‘challenging’. The cut & paste aesthetic is also mirrored in the way that the film-makers plunder successful films for the scare sequences – Oh look! A scene of people running around screaming in the dark like The Blair Witch Project (1999) – and lots of static shots of a bed like in Paranormal Activity (2007), and the only creepy moment of the film is reminiscent of a far more effective sequence in The Others (2001).
I always feel a bit bad panning a first feature – I have no problem with film-makers using the horror genre as a stepping stone to possible future commercial success, as long we get a half-decent film out of their efforts, but if what we get is an under-developed, badly-made, and frankly cynical attempt to jump on a cycle that every horror fan is sick to the back teeth of, I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.
“The second tape leaves more questions than answers” says the announcer at the intro of this film. The only question I was left with was ‘why bother?’.
Daylight is available now at VOD site The Horror Show.