Robbie is played by Brady Allen, a six-year-old with short blonde locks and big, olive-green eyes. To look at him, you would think him to be sweet and harmless, but in his performance he wields the same subtle, skin-crawling menace that Harvey Stephens used to bone-chilling effect in Donner’s 1976 opus. His character is a quiet, composed, emotionally reserved loner with a bizarre tendency to disappear and reappear with no logical, or natural, explanation. His presence is unsettling, serving to compensate for the disappointing diminishing returns of this fourth installment’s haunted house department — the terrors of household objects moving of their own accord can only go so far.
Followers of the found-footage horror series should recall the disquieting climax of the underrated second installment, in which a demonically possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) butchered her sister and brother-in-law in their spacious suburban home before abducting her newborn baby nephew, Hunter, and walking off into the darkness with him. “Paranormal Activity 4” picks up five years after their disappearance, when a Nevada family of four gain two new neighbours in the house across the street: a mother, whom we do not see nor hear for quite some time, and young Robbie. Though it is not explicitly stated, we are left to assume that this quirky child is the missing Hunter.
Our heroine is Alex (Kathryn Newton), a bright and bubbly 15-year-old girl with a peculiar habit of filming mundane daily activities with a digital camcorder. Alex lives with her younger brother, Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), and her parents, Holly (Alexondra Lee) and Doug (the late Stephen Dunham, to whom the film is dedicated). Although it’s an element that sadly doesn’t go anywhere, the family dynamic is interesting: while they do not argue, mum and dad essentially ignore each other, acting as if all is fine when it is not. Things get even more interesting when Robbie temporarily moves into Wyatt’s room while his mysterious mother is treated in hospital for reasons unknown.
Alex has a boyfriend, the cocky and perverse Ben (Matt Shively), who could easily be obnoxious, but Shively has a goofy charm about him. It is Ben’s idea to surveil Alex’s house when the expected paranormal activity begins (bumps in the night, self-opening doors, etc.), apparently sparked by Robbie’s arrival. Seemingly restless, Robbie wanders about the house late at night, one time caught conversing with an “imaginary friend” called Toby (franchise fans will recognise the name) in the living room.
Set in 2011, “Paranormal Activity 4” is more technologically advanced than its wholly camcorder-framed predecessors. Our perspective is often from recorded Skype conversations between Alex and Ben, as well as from MacBook Pro webcams scattered throughout the house and set to record. Most notably, there is the Xbox Kinect (product placement klaxon!), which projects a grid of thousands of tiny motion-tracking dots visible through a camera on night-vision mode; this leads to two sequences in which Robbie’s friend is shown to be a little more than imaginary.
We also view the action through Alex’s iPhone and camcorder, which stretches logic during certain scenes of life-threatening peril, but at this stage we must simply go with the flow. I liked the character of Alex: she’s pleasant company and is the only member of her family to notice anything wrong with Robbie (her parents, of course, ignore her pleas and laugh at the footage she shows them). Towards the film’s conclusion, Alex (as all scream queens must do) makes some questionable decisions in regards to her own personal safety, but Newton lends to her character a convincing inquisitive nature.
Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (makers of the breathtaking 2010 documentary “Catfish") dangerously evoke iconic images from classics of the genre: the tricycle tracking shots of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining;” the bathtub abduction of Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street;” the above-bed levitation of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist." Such risks pay off well: what we have is an entry in an already iconic franchise acknowledging and homaging its forefathers in a way that is admiring and respectful.
Joost and Schulman, along with screenwriter Christopher Landon, were also the helmers of the terrific third entry, which was inventive with its scare tactics and successfully expanded upon the mythology of the franchise. This is less the case with “Paranormal Activity 4," which (the Robbie character aside) feels very routine and adds little of anything new to the “Paranormal Activity" story. I assumed there would be discoveries made in the (frankly absurd) climax, as was the case in part three, but alas, it is one of those endings that raises more questions than it answers. Presumably the inevitable fifth entry released next Halloween season will provide definitive answers and wrap things up to a more satisfying and conclusive degree.
The first “Paranormal Activity" scared us with the thought that an unknown and malevolent entity could enter our bedroom as we were sleeping, only to be discovered the next morning upon viewing the recorded footage. The sequels have increasingly relied on loud noises and whiz-bang special effects, which are much less frightening. The intimacy of the in-home found-footage method, tied with the naturalistic performances of the leads, keep us gripped, but I miss the minimalistic, psychological terror of the first one.
6/10
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