By Keri O’Shea
I suppose I shouldn’t be amazed that the found footage phenomenon is still rolling jerkily onwards, nor that countries not usually associated with a horror tradition are now having a go themselves; take Peru, for instance, the country which has brought us La Entidad. My knowledge of any relationship between Peru and horror is hazy, I admit, but if it has any significant links to the genre at all for the average Western viewer, it seems more usually when the country is visited by outsiders. Ahem, take Eli Roth, for instance, whose most recent offering, The Green Inferno (2013) was partly filmed in the Peruvian Amazon. La Entidad is, of course, a far cry away from that, but by the same token, it doesn’t deviate from the found footage formula we know and ‘love’ in any significant ways either, regardless of its ostensibly unconventional setting.
Let me demonstrate. After some short, unedited clips of people screaming and running around in the dark gives way on-screen text talking of the deep web legend of a ‘creature’ appearing on several people’s footage, our story proper begins in film school – where a group of young, impetuous wannabe documentary filmmakers are striving for a new angle. Enter Carla (Daniella Mendoza), a peer who is rather more resourceful than the boys; she offers to set them up with a new project – filming ‘reaction videos’ – where you observe people watching strong footage which itself is never revealed, only the facial contortions of the people who do see it. Basically, it’s like Gogglebox, only for torture porn. And it’s very ‘now’. The guys – Benjamin, Joshua and Lucas, agree that this is a superb idea and are delighted when Carla procures some examples. (She does this by breaking into a camera room at the college, where you’d think people would be freaked out that old, dusty, analogue cameras all seem to be fully charged and functional. But anyway.)
After the gang have all watched the footage, Carla reveals that she actually recognises someone on the film. His name is Sergio, so why not go around to his house to find out more? Well, you’ve guessed it – there’s a good reason why he isn’t coming out to play, so step up Santiago, his older brother, who offers to talk to the group about what happened. Thus is the film poised to motor through as many other features of found footage as it can fit in to eighty minutes – a chain curse, a local legend, some torture, and yes, an entity.
If it sounds as if I’m being unduly negative, well – I am, to an extent. Although La Entidad makes some use of a specifically Peruvian-flavoured legend, it doesn’t really have the confidence to do much else which marks it out, meaning you get a hell of a sense of deja-vu here – that cumulative deja-vu you get when you watch a lot of horror films, crossed with that thing where you waste your own time by guessing all the twists by twenty minutes in, and believe me, that isn’t a tacit way for me to say I’m especially knowledgeable – it simply comes from so many filmmakers feeling unable to deviate from the blueprint. I’ve mentioned the miraculous ever-ready camera locked deep in storage; you can also tick off the people frequently asking ‘why are you filming?’ (oh alright, in Spanish); the way that even digital cameras make that weird analogue static-clunk in-between takes, which they just do not do in real life; the running-and-filming-one’s-feet motif; the way all found footage creatures seem to make the same tinny screeching noise; the way all found footage creatures economically fail to appear on camera unless in some sort of interference, or a flash which occurs almost off-camera; it’s all in there, and the film doesn’t benefit by it.
It’s not all bad news, though, and whilst the film has the sense to move along at a reasonably quick pace, it’s also shot in some aesthetically-pleasing locations. I did like the cemetery where a lot of key scenes happen, and wished I could see more of it than what we get via a flashlight and no tripod. La Entidad also makes an effort to join up several plot elements which are, in practical terms, different from one another, and so it juggles some decently done make-up effects with a dash of CGI. These are never around very long, but it actually works out well and looks good on-screen, showing that some effort has been made to lift the film up beyond the lowest-common-denominator ordinary. Dare I say it, but in its simplest, most low-key moments, the film manages to be authentically quite creepy. And then there’s the performances, which – considering that all of the cast are completely new to acting – aren’t bad at all, and definitely help to add an element of interest to proceedings.
I’d honestly love to know what brought director/writer/producer Eduardo Schuldt to this project, I really would. So far, he’s made a few family-friendly animations, which have no bearing on this film whatsoever: there’s certainly nothing in his filmography to suggest even a passing interest in the horror genre. Perhaps a change is as good as a rest; who knows? With what he’s given us here, though, we have a blend of frustratingly formulaic and frustratingly promising moments – the former hold sway, quite honestly, but there’s something here which suggests that Schuldt could go places with this career move, if he only gets the confidence to forget what’s bleedin’ obvious and branch out on his own somewhere. La Entidad is by no means a dire film; it just quickly falls into a rut which isn’t of its own making.
La Entidad (2015) is released in the UK on the 5th October 2015.