By Keri O’Shea
As a fan and as a reviewer, I can usually find plenty to say about the pre-release movies I get sent. It’s what we do here, after all. Whether I love a film or I hate it, I can – I hope – explain my response to it in a fairly detailed way, a way which might allow others to make a decision on whether or not to take a chance on the film in question. That’s my hope, anyway. However, Muirhouse has me at a complete loss. Muirhouse has been a transcendent experience unlike any other.
Allow me to explain that I am not giving the film the slightest scrap of praise in saying that. I mean simply that my initial indifference to yet another found footage movie altered as the film progressed. I moved from boredom, into confusion. From confusion, I became irate, and then angry. Eventually I overcame my anger, but to try and enunciate all of those emotions in a review? Forget it. You know how in Martyrs, Anna is tormented and tormented until she surpasses the physical plane, leaving her agonies behind? That’s pretty much what Muirhouse has done to my reviewing mojo.
Okay. The film starts with a shirtless man walking down a road holding a hammer, thence getting wrestled to the ground by some police. This is apparently Philip Muirhouse, an author, who has been at a haunted house making a documentary intended to accompany his upcoming book about …haunted houses. As you do. The rest of the film is his story, and I use the word ‘story’ in its loosest possible sense here. We are shown (and who the hell has edited this stuff together? When?) his preparations for said documentary, largely him doing take after take where he tries to introduce the damn thing and keeps making a mess of it (and are all of those attempts included here for posterity? You betcha!) before making plans to go to the notorious Monte Cristo house to continue filming. Oh, he’ll have to be there on his own. Oh. No reason not to carry on trying to make a documentary with no suitable equipment like a tripod or any perceivable point in mind. Bon chance, Mr Muirhouse!
That’s it. That’s the film. One man in a house. There is no character arc here, no beginning, middle or end, no increase in tension, no tension whatsoever, no plot, little dialogue, no resolution. No special effects. Nothing. If your taste runs to spending around an hour watching a man sitting in the dark doing fuck all except listening to the occasional thump from upstairs or occasionally running up and down stairs/in and out of the front door, camera in hand of course, then this might be for you. If you expect more from a film, then I guarantee you will be disappointed. Even within the lazy, derivative and nonsensical worst of this genre, this is a doozy. Whoever has put this footage together has made some baffling choices for inclusion (minute upon minute of a tape recorder operating? The botched intro over and over again? Stock footage of gardens!?) and call me a bluff old cynic, but it seems like a lot of the stuff here is simply padding to get the film up to its eighty minute total. There simply isn’t enough here for a film. NOTHING HAPPENS. And yet, even with all of the filler included here, there still manage to be ‘plot’ gaps.
Muirhouse is a lazy, aimless, pathetic excuse for a film. It has none of the elements you would expect, as a minimum, a film to contain. It uses a shooting style which has been done to death and somehow makes it simultaneously unbelievable and more tedious than other films of the same style. It lacks the courage of its convictions, giving the lie to its ‘supernatural’ theme by not bothering, or at least failing to include anything supernatural beyond things that go bump off-camera. It has no scares, and generates no interest in what happens to its by-and-large only character. When it has dragged itself along for an hour and twenty minutes, it just stops. It doesn’t even have the decency to tie things together at the end. It just stops. I cannot think of a single thing worthy of praise here. However, should anyone want an example of just what is wrong with a lot of modern horror cinema, Muirhouse could at least be held high.
And in the spirit of the film itself, here’s where I just stop.
Muirhouse will be released by Monster Pictures on 10th February 2014.