Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Margot (Emily Bader) was dropped off at a hospital by her mother when she was a baby. She seems to have grown up in a proper adoptive home, but as a lot of adopted children growing up do, she wants to learn about her birthparents. So she is pretty enthusiastic when her cousin Samuel (Henry Ayres-Brown) contacts her via one of those DNA ancestry websites. Her mother is apparently dead, her father not much of theme for discussion, but there are still quite a few other relatives around. Also, the family turn out to be Amish.

Because this is a POV horror film, Margot decides to make a documentary about her first encounter with her family, so she’s accompanied to the meeting and potential Amish sleepover by her buddy and cameraman Chris (Roland Buck III) and local sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert). As all local sound guys or tech guys in all POV horror movies ever, the latter is our Odious Comic Relief of the day, I’m sorry to say.

Having backup might just turn out to be useful in the non-documentarian aspects of Margot’s stay with the family, because there are clearly dark secrets nobody is telling her about, as well as a possible supernatural presence, or dare I say paranormal activity.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the Paranormal Activity series, and the only film I remember actually enjoying was that Japanese spin-off, so I have no idea if there are any connections between this one directed by William Eubank (who made the wonderful Underwater, which I apparently never got around to writing up) and the lore of the earlier Paranormal Activity movies apart from the usual “It’s demons!” stuff too many US movies about the supernatural are fixated on. Though, since the proper description would be – and here the SPOILERS come in, sweetie(s) – “It’s a demon caged in the bodies of one of their women per generation by a family that only pretends to be Amish for tactical(!?) reasons!”, I can’t really complain about the film’s backstory being too typical.

In fact, the whole Amishsploitation angle with the added cynical wrinkle of them being fake Amish, so Amishsploitation is okay again, is symptomatic of the general stupidity of Christopher Landon’s script, where no angle seems to be too silly to be used when it is convenient. If you expect the Fake-Amish family’s methods to achieve their goals to make sense, or think that there just might be a slightly better way to trap a possessed woman than the one these guys use, you’ll probably go out of this one fuming.

The thing is though, as so often happens with movies quite this stupid, if a viewer is going with the flow, treating this as if it were an Italian bit of craziness from the 80s or 90s, for example, the whole big junk of nonsense can be great fun, with one silly idea following the next with great enthusiasm until everything climaxes in the fake-Amish apocalypse. Just don’t ask questions, like “why would a demon supposedly responsible for lust just get people to commit suicide with a single look?” or “why not post a guard in front of your demon hole (or security cameras, since you have them hidden everywhere else)?”. I found myself having quite a bit of fun with the wintery mood of the whole affair (beautifully shot by Pedro Luque) and admired the silly-coolness of the main set pieces instead of getting annoyed by them. While they make little sense on a logical level, the church out in the winter woods and the caves below it where the demon is trapped are very impressive pieces of set design too, really hitting on a nice and effective note of the desolate and the Gothic.

Eubank gives things a nice visual flow, too, sometimes sneakily breaking the found footage basics of the film for a better shot (particularly in the final act, where things become a bit more chaotic), so there’s a nice degree of forwards momentum you don’t always get in the sub-genre.

Seen that way, there’s little wrong with Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin I would want to be fixed, apart from the Odious Comic Relief, of course.