Review of Unholy (2007) by Ibraheem M — 26 Apr 2012

Unholy (Daryl Goldberg, 2007).

I wanted to like this movie a great deal more than I did; the concept is amazing, and the acting is, in general, up to that standard. Unfortunately, it takes a few wrong turns in the script, and the farther on we go, the more lost we become, until there is a point towards the end of the movie where you know you're never going to find your way back to that luminous path of potential on which you started out.

Plot: Martha (Adrienne Barbeau) is a distraught mother. She has just (in the movie's opening sequence) unsuccessfully attempted to talk her daughter, Hope (Thralls' Siri Baruc), out of suicide. Her other child, Lucas (Pinata: Survival Island's Nicholas Brendon), comes home to help her cope, and the two of them start looking for answers. The more they dig, the weirder things get.

Saying what they start finding, even close to the beginning, would be plunging deep into spoiler territory, so I'll just say that while it's nothing you haven't seen before, scriptwriter Sam Freeman takes a number of disparate things you've seen and attempts to put them together in such a way as to be, if not wholly original, at least well on the way. And from what we can see of the big picture by the time we get to the end, he was really on to something. Too bad he doesn't seem to have spent a great deal of time thinking about internal consistency in his conceit, which leads to some moments where the viewer is shaking his head and wondering why no one thought to question this or that angle. Unfortunately, if you're working in this sort of speculative vein, the sort of internal consistency we don't get is exactly what the script needs to carry everything off. Which turns this from a movie advertising endless possibilities into something of a slog.

Worth checking out for the concept, but don't expect to enjoy it much. **.