Rorschach (2015)

directed by C.A. Smith

USA

75 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This movie is available free and legally on youtube with the claim "Scariest movie online?" tacked onto the title, which to me was a red flag that got even redder with the fact that the channel that uploaded it belongs to the director. You shouldn't have to attempt to turn your movie into a viral video to make it known, and most of the time claims like that are overly presumptuous at best and untrue at worst. But that's most of the time. Not this time.

It's ironic that the director apparently places such emphasis on scariness when Rorschach feels like exactly the kind of film that is deliberately avoiding the trap of equating scariness with overall quality that so many horror movies get into, and is all the better for it. Some of the greatest horror movies are not scary, and some scary movies are cheap and boring. That Rorschach's whole brand kind of hinges on the fact that it is A YouTube Movie, with a semi-meta emphasis on its identity as a document of the digital age, makes it part and parcel of a found-footage movement that I saw emerge mostly in the earlier 2010s and fizzle out towards the end of the decade as bigger studios caught on and produced things like Unfriended. For a while, found-footage movies were coming out that were so dedicated to looking realistic that sometimes there was barely any actual paranormal activity in them, and it was great. To have these movies that bucked the trend so strongly and focused on creating something that could plausibly have not been fiction was a redefinition of the genre and a spotlight on the best of what YouTube and social media in general can do for horror. Rorschach's intensely pared-down, bare-bones yet still stylish approach to filmmaking impressed me and surprised me.

The film is very unoriginal in its concept, which is another thing found-footage can get away with as the important thing is usually how the paranormal stuff is executed and not the drama and intrigue of a unique plot. Two skeptical investigators respond to a desperate call from a single mother and her young daughter who are facing simple but constant inexplicable activity in their home. The occurrences are really small and subtle- quiet voices, objects moving, scratching and knocking noises- but it's very easy to tell that the woman is worn down by how it never lets up. Instead of large, showy events, Rorschach gives us a haunting that is a series of steady small nudges towards the end of one's rope, which, honestly, implies a much more disturbing entity, as it's shown to delight in torturing its victims slowly instead of making itself known less ambiguously.

The acting is good, essentially indistinguishable from real interactions, which to me is a much tougher thing to get right than to make a movie we're not supposed to be able to pretend is real. The set is realistic and is basically just someone's actual house as far as I'm concerned. And although it does use a very tired "creepy doll" trope at times, this movie is genuinely scary- I hesitate to put any emphasis on that because I just spent some time explaining my opinion on how scariness shouldn't be the determining factor here, but I would be remiss not to mention that this is definitely a creepy film. Put together, all of the scenes involving the haunting don't amount to that much, but Rorschach knows it has a good hand and knows exactly when to show it and when not to. I won't spoil the ending, but the final scene before the epilogue is one of those things that was so freaky it made me not want to look directly at the screen. This is a really solid hidden gem of the YouTube era of filmmaking- not tough to pull off when the competition is mostly trash, but difficult to find when buried within mountains of said trash.