Dead Voices (2020) (USA)

⭐️

Sara refuses the marriage proposal of her boyfriend Lucas because she doesn’t want to be forced into the role of “military wife”. Adding further awkwardness, her sister records the whole damn thing because she figured there would be a happier ending. Lucas ships out to Iraq with a broken heart and is presumed dead after his unit gets hit by an IED and his body is never found. Sara moves on but her sister Emily is about to open old wounds for a college project she’s working on. Reluctantly, Sara gives Emily permission to seek out a medium who can contact Lucas in the beyond and find out just what happened to him overseas. They eventually find a dude who can do just that but Mike is told by mysterious voices that Lucas may not be dead and there’s a connection to a family mountain cabin located in the middle of nowhere. The shoddy news report that opens up the film, delivered by a “news anchor” who may still be in high school, lets us know the sisters are missing, so we are already well aware that their trip out to the property with the medium doesn’t end well. They discover signs of Satanism and encounter disturbing shadow people and inhuman shrieking in the surrounding woods when nightfall hits. Mike has a vision of some horrible shit going down at the location which culminated in a couple nasty murders. Sara forgetting her medication is ominously mentioned, Mike has goofy psychic fits that border on incredibly painful constipation, the camera glitches often, nobody is particularly good at conveying any character trait outside of “annoying”, Lochlyn Monroe embarrasses himself as a psychic who refuses to help the girls out when he stops by for a reading and gets freaked out, nobody has any chemistry which is sadly impressive for a movie with such a limited cast and it’s a chore to get through all 80 of these minutes. It’s definitely bad… there’s no “but” here, it’s just definitely bad.