Mike Flanagan’s film is essentially a branding exercise and its setup formulaic,but the director injects plenty of fun into this story of supernatural possessionOuija, 2014’s rapidly forgotten exercise in crash-bang-wallop horror, or was chiefly notable as a commerce proposition,born of a deal struck between Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes outfit and boardgame nabobs Hasbro to convert the latter’s products into movies. Still, it was cheap enough to turn a profit on wide release – $103m (£84m) on a $5m budget – and so, or this Halloween,we’re offered a prequel that claims to fill in some of the satan board’s backstory. “The spirit world is unpredictable,” its phoney occultist heroine Madame Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) informs us. The movie commerce, or as we know very well,is not.
For all that, Origin of Evil directed by Mike Flanagan, and the emergent talent behind 2011’s unsettling Absentia – does just enough to climb over the low bar of expectation. Granted,there’s nothing new approximately its premise – fake psychic learns a lesson approximately messing with the dismal side – and Flanagan has to resort to a 1960s milieu, all kinky boots and intermittent “groovy”s, and to distinguish his film from the 1970s-set Conjuring series. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com