The film opens with the events leading up to the disappearance of Nicole (Agnes Bruckner, “Blood and Chocolate”), a single mother and recovered drug addict. It is Christmastime, and Nicole has returned to her family home in the California suburbs following the death of her estranged, abusive mother. She is on her own. While talking to her young daughter on what I believe to be Skype, Nicole’s attention is drawn to a closet that stands opposite the living room. Its door is ajar, revealing only darkness inside. She places her laptop down, approaches the closet, nudges the door open and enters the darkness. Suffice to say, she is never seen again.
The following morning, Nicole’s tough-nut younger sister, Annie (Caity Lotz, “Death Valley”), arrives on a motorbike (she’s tough, I tell you) to find an empty home. But she’s not surprised: silly big sis is most likely on another one of her benders, and failed to inform Annie, as usual. She’ll probably turn up soon, right? She always does. Mother’s funeral passes, and Nicole is yet to reappear. The sisters’ cousin, the sensible Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins, “Episodes”), comes to stay for the night, and she promptly disappears too.
It is with this that Annie suspects there might be an uninvited, unearthly presence stalking her childhood home. Well, that and the fact that she is violently dragged towards that almightily ominous closet by an invisible force during the night (a la the supernatural leg-grabbing and floor-dragging of “Paranormal Activity” and “Paranormal Activity 2”). She escapes its unseen grasp, flees, and runs out of the house, weeping and screaming in unbridled terror. She swears to never enter the abode again. But, surprise surprise, she breaks this oath, several times.
Two more players are added to this equation. One is Creek (Casper Van Dien, “Starship Troopers”), a local cop who is skeptical but reasonable. The other, more intriguing one is Stevie (Haley Hudson, “Look”), a scrawny, pale-faced, sunken-eyed, softly spoken psychic and old high school pal of Annie whose powers are evidently very real, and very strong. Hudson is a striking presence, and not necessarily for her startling physical appearance or voice, but for her uncanny ability to attract the viewer’s eyes, ears and attention - hers is a scene-stealing performance. Truly, she is the Zelda Rubinstein of “The Pact.”
But Hudson doesn’t steal the movie, for that belongs to Lotz. Our endangered heroine, she guides us through this haunted house story, and does so commandingly. As Annie, Lotz plays an independent gal attempting to suppress long-buried rage as she re-enters the home in which she lived - or endured - for 16 years. As she finds out, there’s much more left to endure. Like rising star Elizabeth Olsen in the underwhelming horror remake “Silent House,” Lotz spends much of the film clad in a revealing tank top, tiptoeing her way across shadowy rooms and disconcertingly quiet hallways with what can only be described as an expression of fearful curiosity - her curiosities certainly don’t go unquenched for very long.
Re-exploring and expanding upon a short film he premiered last year at the Sundance Film Festival, McCarthy shoots the low-budgeted, low-key “The Pact” with an indie sensibility: this of course means handheld camerawork, a muted colour palette and restrained use of a backing soundtrack. An unanticipated mumblecore aesthetic is the result, which initially clashes with the counteracting horror elements once they start to creep in (think a non-comedic “Cyrus” with flickering lights and self-opening fridge doors). To begin with, this is a problem.
However, a compromise is soon reached: the bump-in-the-night moments are awarded a visceral edge by the naturalism of the mumblecore method, and the gloominess of the mumblecore method gives way to a bleak and haunting atmosphere. The scares themselves, they range from the clichéd to the inspired: the sudden inexplicable falling of a crucifix from the bedroom wall is clichéd; one inventive use of Google Maps, or more specifically Google Street View, is inspired, making good use of that strange blurring effect you get when an object hasn’t quite been captured right by the Street View camera.
“The Pact” leads the viewer down a route I was not expecting to go down, and I liked that: far too often do films of the horror genre follow a path that one can foresee far too soon. I also liked how gripping it is, and how intriguing its story manages to be, in spite of a notable lack of originality. An effective chiller, it’s a creepy and unsettling experience, and occasionally quite a scary one, though perhaps not to the same extent that, say, the “Paranormal Activity” films succeeded in being; they beat “The Pact” to the punch on the invisible leg-grabbing front.
7/10
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