A school project has a promising student digging deep into a decades-old cold case family massacre from the home town she barely remembers. We’re watching the unedited memory card from her camera, so it would be my educated guess that Leah Sullivan got a little too close to unearthing something better left buried. A now abandoned Massachusetts home in the woods was the site of an unsolved murder and now stands as a local bit of haunted house lore… makes for one hell of an intriguing subject. She befriends a police officer from the town and he grows quite smitten with her, which gives her a strong head start when it comes to getting access to information and help where others would not be as fortunate. Together they jump off solid earth and into one hell of a rabbit hole involving missing people, cover-ups, haunted houses, a possible mafia connection and even precognitive children who knew their demise was imminent. Anna Stromberg is wonderful as the completely likable young woman who gets in way over her head and pays dearly for it. She’s surrounded by folks who seem so damn real and it only eases the suspension of disbelief behind the slow-burning dread the viewer experiences. The flick takes its time which makes its intriguing story way more interesting than it would have been had it just dove headfirst into chaos (it also allows the shaky-cam shenanigans to be absent for most of the runtime) and the fact that the person behind the camera is incredibly likable (she does slip into some annoying habits as we come to the close) gives it a leg up over most of these found-footage things I come across for free on whatever streaming platform I’m haunting on my day off.
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