Review of Slender Man (2018) by Viniciusbrito — 25 Oct 2018

A group of friends decide, in a house of one of them during the night, to summon the slender man starting of a link on the internet, and some time after that they start to have nightmares, seeing things in the woods and after a bit sometime one of them disappear without any clue of what happened, then the friends go and do their own investigations to find out what could have happened. Directed by Sylvain White and written by David Birke.

The story of this movie is very simple and cliche, it just don't have or increment any new thing in this kind of movie, even the prologue of everything is cliche and a bit ridiculous if you think a bit about it, like, they watch a video in some website and close their eyes, them they are cursed, this is so little creative and repetitive in movies like this. There are some moments that the characters do some dumb thigs, they make pretty clear that they can't uncover their eyes in one moments and see SlenderMan or they are going to be mentally destroyed somehow, and after 10 seconds one of the characters does this exact thing and one second later all of them with the same thing. The movie try to give some possible ways to combat the monsterm, but it is so weak the way that they did it, one of them get to one place to take something, them she takes it and it got mentioned one other time, but it does have zero influence during the course of the movie, it didn't made any sense. The conclusion of the story is also pretty down, like characters saying one thing and doing another, it got so slow in a point that it didn't even scare you anymore, this a high problem in this movie, the script could have been a bit better done and creative. Another big problem in this movie, is that, that the characters aren't much relatable in a way that you would care and cheer for them, there isn't much development for them, and the little bit that happend it didn't really implies in you caring for them, cosidering that this movie is about people in dangerous and not about the monster, they had to make we care for them to this work better, unfortunately it didn't worked out in this way.

The sound of the movie are great, for real, they are done with maestry, there are a lot of moemnts during the movie that I got scared, and it was very thanks to the sound design here, it is very similar to sound that happened in the game from years ago, a very strange and messy thing, wich did represented in sound the creepy and crazy creature very well, the sound in the forest, the details that they did applied in the audio section, made this movie be scary.

One thing that they did here and it gave us very nice moments, is the suggestiveness, in a lot of moments you see a shadow or a tree, and you be like that it could be that or not, it is good, letting our mind work to see something or not, that did happened a lot witht the characters to, just that in some moments it was very ridiculous, but mainly at the start of the movie, it did worked out very well.

The acting is not the best neither the worst. Joey King did a very nice character, the problem is that she didn't had any development, the little that I cared about her, it was because of the actress. Julia Goldani had a bit more emotional moment, I think that she did well in some moments, but mostly of the movie she had a poker face that didn't pleased me very much. Jaz Sinclair also had the most cliche faces during some moments, unfortunately she didn't had much time to work or room to do different things.

The CGI is awful here, like it is the worst 10 million dollar budget cgi ever, they did turned the light out of the movie in a lot of moments, wich could have been good to hide the bad cgi, but even with that, the cgi is so exposed and so bad and fake that when they show him, the fear kind of go away, because it is so fake, the creature naturally have a strange form and could scare people easily, but the did invented somethings here with the trees that just didn't worked for me.

The movie was working better when the thing was being more of a mental situation, but when they decide to show and interact with the monster physically, things stop working.