The synopsis claims that a man dreams about a camera on his kitchen table and he finds the damn thing when he wakes up. The footage on the camera is his nightmare and that’s what we’re watching. I don’t think this is expressed in the film. A woman hires a man to film her husband because something very strange is going down. When the husband gets agitated, the woman tells the videographer to leave. Things get very strange. Insane people working under shadowy motivations seemingly pop up at random and it’s all caught through the lo-fi eye of our protagonist Alex’s camcorder. He flees into the night and then pops up back at the woman’s apartment where this all started. There’s something very wrong with her husband. Fuck if I know. The videographer meets up with a new person. It’s a guy showing off his new apartment. Unit 40. The guy goes on about religion and starts quoting scripture. The unit renter claims that he got the place at a steal because every other person who has lived there has died under mysterious circumstances. He claims he’s seeing a phantom tenant but he’s been unable to capture any proof. Hey! An actual plot… kind of. The renter is having trouble sleeping and believes something awful is going on as he slumbers. There’s definitely a woman wandering the apartment and she’s definitely not adhering to the laws of physics. More scripture is read and the renter acts strange. There’s alot of people acting strange in this. This is mostly a movie focused on people acting strange. Alex films the man sleeping. I start drifting too. The man rolls out of bed onto the floor and just sort of stays there. Alex investigates but finds the floor empty. “Spooky” demon voices and more weird behavior follows. The rental guy pees in a pot and calls it “discharge”. More scripture. I find myself drifting again. A random person runs at the camera, holding a knife and screaming. Perhaps the phantom tenant? I think that’s how the first segment ended. I don’t remember, that was days ago. A man brings in Alex to film his wife acting strange so he can use it to convince their pastor to perform an exorcism. She flees into an orange grove when her husband tries to take her to a church. She gets upset when Alex doesn’t answer if he wants to eat an orange with her. A mysterious woman shows up. We then go back to the apartment we’ve been at for all of the “segments” and see Alex speaking with the concerned husband as his wife acts… you guessed it… strange. If you’re playing the official Merits of Sin drinking game… congratulations, you’re dead. There’s an interesting sort of hazy nightmare logic at work that builds up a suitably baffling atmosphere but without much of a narrative to build upon, it just kind of gets lost in its own ambiance. Performances are where you’d expect them to be with something working under these budgetary limits (some much better than others) and it pulls off some minor eeriness as it wanders in and out of drowsiness but at more than 100 minutes, it feels like it’s dragging to a payoff that doesn’t exist. It has a better focus than the vastly overrated Skinamarink and a heavy vibe of the liminal spaces that haunt the Backrooms series but is also more watchable than either. You can throw it up there with The McPherson Tape (it has the conviction and skill to be convincing as an actual piece of discovered video) in the category of an interesting yet flawed found footage experiment.
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