It’s been 18 years since The Blair Witch Project ushered in the popularity of the found-footage horror film. At the time, small handheld camcorders felt like the scourge of privacy; someone always seemed to be filming something because of the ease and relative cheapness of the mini-DV tape. That a group of young people would inadvertently film their own demise was a disbelief easily suspended.
With such projects requiring only microscopic budgets and offering the potential for big returns, producers couldn’t help but to continue Blair Witch-ing the horror-loving audience. The knockoffs are difficult to count at this point, and for every Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity there seem to be a dozen films like Unfriended and Quarantine. The Gracefield Incident is the latest effort to fall into the latter category.
Mathieu Ratthe, the writer/director/star of this film, takes a novel approach to the subgenre’s prerequisite of finding a plausible reason for continuous recording. His character, Matt, loses an eye in car crash that occurs because he and his wife, Jessica (Kimberly Laferriere), were making a video journal for their unborn child while driving to the OBGYN. The accident also causes Jessica to suffer a miscarriage. Months later, Matt, a media professional, inserts a camera into his prosthetic eye. At first, it seems like he’s trying to perform some kind of penance by documenting his recovery from grief, but that’s giving this affair a little more credit than it deserves. The found-footage format requires that a camera is always rolling, so Ratthe made his hands-free.
A news broadcast that Matt is barely paying attention to describes the destruction of a satellite by a UFO. There’s even a bit of footage. You’d think a first contact scenario might be a bigger deal to Matt and his friends as they pile into Matt’s SUV to drive to an isolated cabin in an area of Quebec called Gracefield, but the group is more focused on celebrating a birthday and getting Matt and Jessica to get over their pain. Why four other people would want to let Matt drive after causing the accident that cost him his eye and unborn child is anyone’s guess. Maybe he was the only one with a valid license. Another plot point revolves around his bad driving and poor decisions, making one wonder if the working title was Please Take the Keys from Matt.
What follows is a pastiche of more successful movies. Ratthe borrows liberally from The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity with a smattering of Signs and Close Encounters of the Third Kind thrown in for good measure. The cabin turns out to be more of a gated manse owned by Matt’s boss, who bought the place because it’s near Bigfoot sightings. That’s right, the boss tracks Bigfoot. Unfortunately for Matt and his friends, sasquatches come from another world and they have retrieved a meteorite that belongs to it. Like every other character in this movie, alien Bigfoot makes inexplicable decisions. There is no reason it couldn’t have just taken what it wanted 20 minutes into this endeavor and saved us all the trouble of watching the rest of the movie.
The biggest crime The Gracefield Incident commits is tedium. Clichés flow like light beer. Long stretches of running and shouting outdoors, indoors, in the woods, in a cave and in a cornfield burden the movie’s 89-minute runtime, making it feel so much longer. The lack of narrative logic is surpassed only by the lack of tension or any inventive or frightening moments. The only thing The Gracefield Incident provokes is the certainty that when it comes to found-footage horror flicks, the thrill is long gone.
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