A couple audibly necking, another sharing their moment-to-moment impressions, another coming in—no joke—forty minutes late. It all adds to the slow, chatty build-up of the film, whose every shot is ostensibly either home-video footage or security-camera tape of one big American house in high-foreclosure style. That weird affective content of video—pure boredom, boredom copied over old boredom, something both less and more than just watching the world. As if to say, Oh God, the world. And maybe its secrets are visible, but the rewinding, the tracking to find them, while no less than six cameras multiply time until the inevitable point after which not enough new time remains to possibly review it all.
Great ordinary-looking white people, speaking in the amazing way of the moment, like the wife’s alternating sing-song, scare-quote-framed, or falsetto “black” voice. For this considerable sin a demon wants their toddler, who when poltergeisted from his crib heads right for the stairs and fucks with the basement doorknob, of course. Don’t get me started. Basement where the mother gets dragged, later, to emerge serenely murderous. So what happens down there? They have gorgeous pills you can take, these days.
Strange, that once again at the end of a horror film an audience member loudly declares, “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” But to call a movie bad is only to say, the means by which it has sought to induce me to feel the feelings I consider valid were in this instance too clumsy and bald, forcing me to admit that those feelings are not in fact real or whole or constant enough to truly buoy me out of this irritating finitude. How fine, then, to know no such disappointments. What stillness, rather, I find here, what fattening in the glow. And when the lights come on I scurry home, a bedbug, which it pleases me to be—that’s Kafka’s trip, not mine—snug and sated and among my kind, invisible to the dimensions that nourish me and myself unconcerned, except in a practical way too straightforward to be called rapacious, with them.
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