Like any over-saturated subgenre, found footage is a precarious prospect because we’ve seen it all before, the same can be said with home invasion. There are so many great home invasion narratives that it’s easy to get swamped by the more popular, groundbreaking, titles. Being savvy and self-aware can result in something like You’re Next or The Strangers. Being daft and uninspired relegates your film to the bargain basement of any genre. And that’s where Sean Carter’s Keep Watching unfortunately belongs.
The film follows moody teenager Jamie (Bella Thorne) on a trip to the countryside with her young brother (Chandler Riggs), Dad (Ioan Gruffudd), and step-mum (Natalie Martinez). It doesn’t take long before the family are sealed inside their house and hunted by assailants whilst webcams film the horror for home viewers.
The biggest problem is that Carter seems to think he has a total winner of an idea. There’s a lot of pretention around a concept most of us will have seen a few times in various scarier forms. The whole ‘viewers of sadistic violence encourage sadistic violence’ thing has been tired a while now, and neither Joseph Dembner’s script nor Carter’s direction really has anything new to say.
Keep Watching suffers massively from telling us everything, never giving itself the opportunity to breathe and unfurl. Between mediocre moments of cat ‘n’ mouse, the dialogue screams exposition and self-importance, relishing reveals we saw coming a mile off. The introductory news coverage spells out what the film is going to be in the plainest terms. After that, we’re just waiting expectantly for the game to begin and after 25 long minutes with dull characters, some of them start to die, thankfully. All this spoon-feeding and labouring is a total tension kill, though.
The rest of the film bobs along on the merits of its actors, who do as well as they can with what they have. Lead performer Thorne comes across as wooden next to Chandler Riggs (Carl from The Walking Dead). Ioan Gruffud and Natalie Martinez are pretty dull, but Leigh Whannell, director of Saw/all-round modern horror icon arrives to liven the mood with his casual charisma.
It’s a boring film to look at and to behold, its scares are woefully misguided (drones aren’t intimidating), and its visuals are uninspired. All of this is a genuine shame because the one thing they nail is brutal messy death scenes. Aside from that though, it’s a film too indebted to The Strangers and Unfriended but totally void of those films’ atmospheres.
Bad writing, uninspired filmmaking, and crap dialogue make Keep Watching a slog of a thrill-ride. You won’t find it hard to stop watching.
KEEP WATCHING / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: SEAN CARTER / SCREENPLAY: JOSEPH DEMBNER / STARRING: BELLA THORNE, CHANDLER RIGGS, IOAN GRUFFUDD, NATALIE MARTINEZ / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
