The Taking of Deborah Logan was another film that I saw people strongly recommending others see for several months before I actually got around to seeing it. The difference between this film and, say, Oculus, however, was that TToDL had gotten a lot less media hype and so I went into it knowing practically nothing about what was going to happen or what the film was even about. A lack of marketing and people being tight-lipped about the film (whenever people talked about it they would avoid discussing anything except in the most general of terms, or utilised spoiler blocks to make sure that key scenes weren't revealed to the unwary, until it felt like I was watching a conversation between people working on the Enigma machine) meant that I went into the film with a completely different mindset than Oculus. Did this subconsciously colour my opinions on TToDL more positively than Oculus? Perhaps.
Deborah Logan and her daughter Sarah have agreed to take part in a documentary about Deborah's struggle with Alzheimer's disease for a PhD student's thesis. What starts out as a rather sad documentary watching a strong woman who doesn't even seem that old slowly losing her memories and her mind starts to take on a more disturbing turn as Deborah's behaviour becomes stranger and then violent towards herself and others. Sarah and the PhD student Mia try to work out what is causing these changes, as it starts to become clear that it's not just Alzheimer's that Deborah is suffering from. Is it mental illness, buried traumatic memories coming to the surface as the Alzheimer's goes through the brain, or is there something else at work?
At this point in time (2015) even I, a fan of the genres, have to admit that the time of the found footage and mockumentary horror sub-genres has come and gone; that horse has been well and truly beaten into glue by legions of "lost tapes" and "final paranormal investigations". But The Taking of Deborah Logan manages to be one of those rare films of the genre that's actually good. If it had been released five or so years earlier it probably would have received a much wider audience and greater acclaim; as it is I suspect many people wrote it off as just another one of "those" movies.
One thing that immediately raises it above the level of many of the other films in this genre is that the majority of the movie doesn't take place through a night vision camera filter. I know, it's a radical idea, but the filmmakers of TToDL apparently remembered that there are other options for filming and decided to go with some of them instead. In the end maybe about five minutes of the film are shot in night vision, and it's at a time when it more or less makes sense to.
Secondly, the film paces itself. It neither attempts to keep all the scares until the very end nor throw everything at the viewer at once in the hope of keeping their attention; instead it slowly builds the story bit by bit, so that by the end when we're faced with the unbelievable truth of things, we're not left blinking confusedly and wondering just what the hell is happening. Deborah's strange behaviour can be put down to the Alzheimer's at first, and even as things start to get strange that's still a perfectly rational explanation of what is happening - long-buried memories coming back to the surface and causing her to act out in confusion. By the time the film starts to drop the serious hints that it's not the disease causing this (round about the time she starts shedding her skin like a snake), we know exactly as much as the protagonists do and so their actions and thoughts on the subject make sense to us.
The film has a few moments where it falls into the trap of "generic found footage/mockumentary movie" - there's a couple of times when Deborah gets that big black eyes and oversized jaw look that's so popular right now, and she gets to speak in a double voice sometimes which might as well be a big flashing neon sign saying, "I'm possessed; ask me how!" But for the most part it relies on the slow creeping scare and on general creepiness and unease to unsettle the viewer. It's not until the final 15-20 minutes that it really lets things go, complete with a brief but stunning revelation scene that needs to be seen to be fully appreciated. It's just a shame that it got released at the tail end of the found footage boom, as it deserves a much wider audience.
Oh, and one warning: there are snakes in this film, so if they bother you it might be better to give the film a miss.
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