Movie Review: Paranormal Activity

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Paranormal Activity–1/2*

Paranormal Activity delivers on low-budget thrills. If that’s what you’re looking for from this sleeper hit of the fall, you can stop reading now. You’ll get what you want here, especially in the final 10 minutes. Enjoy.

For anyone else (and I don’t know why you would want to see Paranormal Activity anyway), know this: you’ll be spending 86 torturous minutes with two people you wouldn’t even talk to at work, let alone root for.

Watching Paranormal Activity, I understood every criticism I’ve ever read about the mumblecore film movement. How can we watch people of a certain age (mine) on film and not want to walk out of the theater, appalled by just how self-involved these people are?

But mumblecore films work on an intellectual level, pointing subtle criticisms at the culture that this (my) generation has been brought up in. Paranormal Activity instead is a supernatural thriller, one that’s light on serious thrills and heavy on two-people saying stupid things.

The gist of the film is this: a woman named Katie (Katie Featherston) has been followed by a demon since she was eight-years-old. When she moves in with her longterm boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), the demon gets jealous and starts throwing regular hissy fits that escalate in response to the boyfriend’s macho posturing. (If the demon was more “woe is me,” it’d be the perfect mumblecore character in its own right.)

Micah is stupid. He’s Sarah Palin stupid. He’s “I’m not getting the swine flu shot” stupid. He’s stupid. He spends most of the movie ignoring expert advice and avoiding further expert opinion. This is a guy who prefers picture books to Wikipedia. He’ll he won’t even rent a season of Supernatural to watch on his over-sized TV.

While I’d like to say that Micha’s willful ignorance is some sort of cultural criticism, I can’t because Paranormal Activity doesn’t give me a reason to. The filmmakers spend so much time on cheap tricks to make people jump out of their seats that the moments with Katie and Micah are worse than simple afterthoughts. They’re deliberately ignored, as if story itself is a nuisance.

I never had that problem with other blockbuster found-footage thrillers. The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield had characters that you could care about. With Paranormal Activity, there isn’t an endearing “marshmallows” moment to start things out right. There isn’t solid melodrama in the end, two people clutching each other as the world falls apart around them. There isn’t much of anything. And when you go to the movies, that’s the scariest thing you can ever encounter.

Paranormal Activity, directed by Oren Peli, is now playing in select cities. The film opens wide on Oct. 16.