Landlocked (2021)

Following the death of his father (Jeffrey Owens), Paul (Paul Owens) returns to the old family home. His father had sent him a video message recorded on actual videotape in which he explained that Paul and his brother Mason (Mason Owens) had exactly a year after his death to take from there what they wanted or needed – afterwards, the building would be pulled down, as already arranged by him.

In the house, Paul finds a strange video camera that apparently has the ability to show and record videos of the past when you look through its viewfinder. Between bouts of grieving, reconnecting with Mason, and soaking up the house’s negative atmosphere, Paul re-experiences parts of his own past with his father, as well as some of the moments he has been absent for. However, the longer he uses the device, the more other things seem to drift into the backgrounds and unexplored spaces of the past, things that seem if not actively inimical to Paul, at least unwise and horrifying to engage with.

This piece of American liminal art house horror (really the sort of thing the French made the fantastique label for) by Paul Owens (and family) about grief and an increasingly weirdened past was partially constructed from actual family videos of the Owens family. It is quite the experience: slow, somewhat meandering in its middle part even with a short running time of 75 minutes, it is also drenched in an atmosphere of genuine strangeness, like very abstract weird fiction turned movie. The film starts from a point of naturalistically exploring grief yet becomes increasingly strange and even horrifying without ever leaving the realm of believable human emotion. In his treatment of the material, and despite the slow pace, Owens shows a great amount of control while also being highly imaginative inside of the borders he has set himself.

At first an effective exploration of grief as absence, the turn towards supernatural horror suggests a slight influence of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, once the things Paul (the director/writer also being the lead actor here) sees and increasingly experiences become strange and threatening and not just heart-breaking, and might begin noticing him noticing them.

There’s an authentically haunting quality to the film, a sense of reality that makes the eventual turn towards the more traditionally supernatural – though not traditionally scary movie-like – particularly effective in a way M.R. James might have approved of, though never done quite this way, as well.