Review of The Canal (2014) by Mark M — 20 Jun 2015

The Canal is Sinister (2012) meeting a house and canal in Ireland. David works as a film archivist and it is through his work of archiving film footage that he comes across a crime footage from 1902, where he sees a man who looks similar to a person he saw in a restroom, and believes to be the true killer of his wife. Meanwhile, Detective McNamara (Steve Oram) has his doubts even after Alice is eventually found and casts his suspicions on David. As David becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about Alice's murder, he begins to lose his grasp on reality and eventually, his sanity, subsequently putting his young son, Billy (Calum Heath), in the line of supernatural fire.

A slow-burn ode to classic horror flicks, The Canal won't appeal to the mainstream horror fanbase expecting scares right off-the-bat as it takes its own sweet time building up to the meat of the movie. With literally zero jump scares, director Ivan Cavanagh manages to throw horrifying imagery in his own unique way through proper build-up of both the beautifully captured atmosphere and the characters... well, character, as it focuses more on expanding David's character, played well by Rupert Evans. The other characters are sort of just... there, as small as the cast already is.

When the scares finally come at the speed of a fetus-shaped bullet train from Hell, the fragmented pieces of the movie come together decently to explain everything that was presented at surface level. But with all of its suspense, dread and morbid imagery, The Canal suffers from an undeveloped horror premise due to its crippling insistence on relying too much on its build-up rather than having a naturally expanding premise.

The Canal's premise bears a faint similarity to that of Jennifer Kent's The Babadook - single parent attempting to shield his/her hapless child from supernatural forces, or even the psychological effects that supernatural forces have on the grieving mind of a widowed parent - but it doesn't quite expand on the psychological aspect either. The movie sort of goes, "Here, David experiences some shit and it affects him," but doesn't bother to delve deeper beyond the tiny crack that it makes with a toy hammer. While most modern horror movies rely too much on exposition and holding back nothing, The Canal's flaw is that it fails to balance the pacing for the development of its presented premise and themes as the movie ominously trudges along. Once the dust settles and the corpses bloat in the cold water of the eponymous canal, nothing is truly explained beyond the supernatural events that David goes through.