In short: Paranormal Investigation (2018)

A very short ouija session apparently still manages to get a young man possessed by an evil spirit. For once, it’s at least not a demon but will turn out to be a well-known murdering Nazi bastard (nobody ever gets possessed by a random murdering Nazi bastard).

Instead of looking for proper help, the guy’s family eventually calls in Andrei (Andrei Indreies), a paranormal investigator with a lot of cameras and not much else going for him. Will anything vaguely interesting happen before the audience falls asleep?

Well, not really. But honestly, this French POV horror film directed by Franck Phelizon isn’t worse than your typical mediocre POV horror film from the country of your choice. It’s just not any better either, and once you’ve seen enough mediocre films in a certain sub-genre repeat the same errors all of its mediocre predecessors have made, and go through only the slightest variations of the same horror set-ups, mediocrity suddenly looks rather bad.

This one, by the way, is, as the title suggests, more on the Paranormal Activity than the Blair Witch side of the POV equation, leaving the woods well enough alone and replacing them with really boring interiors. Apart from its replacement of demons with a ghost (but don’t worry, there’s still an exorcism in your future if you choose to watch this, though one committed by the slowest priest in cinema), there’s nothing original for the sub-genre at all to see here. The acting’s mostly okay, at least.

The plot, though, doesn’t only suffer from being imitative, but also from a bad case of Horror Movie Character syndrome, where nobody ever calls in the authorities before it is much too late, where any sign of mental illness screams “possession”, where priests don’t actually use proper exorcism rites (or bother to even speak to the victim’s family!) but don’t do any cool/interesting shit involving pigs either, and where the heroic ghost hunter decides he probably should sleep in the house where terrible things happen at night instead of just racing over whenever someone calls him to explain that yes, there is indeed something terrible happening there right now, when the film is more than half over.


Other script problems involve way too many pointless transitions, and a complete lack of characterization. Still, it’s not a terrible movie, it’s just derivative, rather boring, and really, really wants to waste your time.