Polaroid (2019)

Bird (Kathryn Prescott) doesn’t just have a dubious name, she’s also an outsider, though not a completely friendless one, at her high school, thanks to her reserved personality that may perhaps border on very mild social phobia. She does of course also have the mandatory dead father and the mandatory mother who loves her but isn’t home often enough to show it. Bird’s life doesn’t get any easier when one of her friends gives her, a noted photography nerd, a vintage polaroid camera he has found at a yard sale. Turns out the camera is cursed, and whoever is photographed with it is soon killed off by a malevolent entity (the inevitable Javier Botet and what looks like a bit too much CGI to me). Which becomes particularly problematic after Bird has shot a group photo of her friends and the guy she is rather keen on.

A lot of the things I enjoyed about Lars Klevberg’s Polaroid do sound as if I am damning the film with faint praise, but for a film hailing from the realm of PG-13 mainstream teen horror, this is really a nice enough effort. The film’s main problem is its monster. While it is conceptually fine and fun enough, the actual CGI-and-Botet execution is just not terribly scary, in part because the Botet-monster has by now become something of a generic shorthand for filmmakers with a limited imagination to use in horror, and in part because the execution doesn’t do much very much at all with the really cool idea of a monster that works like a photograph on various levels.

However, the longer the film went on, the less I found myself miffed by the monster, and started to enjoy myself because of all the other things the film gets right. First and foremost, I really like how the script (by Blair Butler) doesn’t let its characters end up as the clean tropes of teen horror and slasher cinema (the jock, the slut, well, perhaps the final girl), but does indeed put a bit of effort into its mostly effective shorthand characterization. In general, the behaviour of the characters makes sense for who and what they are supposed to be and the situation they find themselves in, without the film feeling the need to use horror movie bullshit to get them killed. Turns out, the supernatural threat is dangerous enough without that, though the film doesn’t go out of its way to kill off characters at all, leaving this with a more interesting structure than the usual string of kills. The film prefers more of an investigative angle to its horror, really. And why, even when a character acts like a total ass in the film’s final third, it does make sense for him to do so at that point.

Otherwise, apart from an unnecessary wrinkle in the final act, the film is simply solidly structured, telling its story as a series of discoveries the teen protagonists make instead of a series of plot twists that happen to them. Nothing they find out is exactly ground-breaking and new for the veteran horror viewer, but it works and isn’t aggressively stupid or clever-clever.

Klevberg’s direction is at its best when it comes to character moments, framing a couple of effective (and even two pretty cool) scare sequences, and a few solid ones with teens acting mostly believably. Again, it’s nothing spectacular, but it does get the job done in a solid an convincing way.


See what I meant about damning with faint praise? See also the solid cast (which in teen horror land of course means much better than expected) with just as solid genre veteran appearances by Mitch Pileggi and Grace Zabriskie, the solid effects, the solid score, and so on and so forth. But honestly, I liked Polaroid!