I honestly don’t even feel good calling this a horror movie, but I guess at the end of the day it is. “Second Coming” is a movie I’d looked forward to watching since I received it and I’m saddened that it didn’t meet my expectations at all. In fact it’s so far below my expectations I was pretty crushed to finish it. “Second Coming” could very well be an engrossing supernatural crime thriller, but in the end it’s really just a glorified television melodrama with a supernatural angle that doesn’t even make good on its tagline of a revenge tale.
It spends so much pointless time on flashbacks involving our protagonist Lora who uses up most of her time trying to decode images and messages from her murdered twin sister, all the while living in a past involving her special bond with her twin and their relationship with their abusive hillbilly father who took great pains in making them suffer and inflicting as much abuse upon them as possible. Meanwhile we visit character Armand, a troubled workaday man inflicted with a growing case of tinnitus that is becoming more and more of a distraction and as you can imagine they’re related to one another where personal demons and revenge eventually come crashing down on one another. For what it’s worth in the end, Jose Zambrano Cassella’s direction is rather rich and he manages to conceive a visually striking thriller with some wicked set pieces, and creepy scenes involving ghosts from beyond the grave and crime scenes.
The flashbacks while tedious are well lit and absolutely grim taking us in to a world that feels very detached from the modern times and somewhat gritty and nightmarish, especially considering the children of the film grew up in this environment. Casella works with what he has and most times it’s a nice looking film. “Second Coming” has real potential to be a gripping movie about coming to terms with personal demons all the while exploring the rapid deterioration of one man stricken with guilty but spends much too much time on pointless exposition and emotionally manipulative flashbacks to ever really involve us in the story. All the while the film takes a shocking drop in absolute quality mid-way meandering in to more melodrama and completely losing the audience in its attempted compelling little murder mystery. The hauntings included in the movie also have the possibility of being spooky and morbid but they feel like regurgitations of Asian horror films with a ghost here who is draped in mud and thick damp black hair.
She acts as nothing more than a plot device giving way to more melodrama and even more pointless expository flash backs that serve to do nothing more than force tear jerking moments of parental abuse down our throats. The performances leave much to be desired, especially in the way of the children’s parts. They’re possibly the most important considering they are meant to express the bonds of these sisters and they fail most times in delivering remotely decent performances completely distracting from the narrative rather than pulling us in. “Second Coming” is in the end a really lackluster and tedious affair, and one that I am really disappointed to discover was a clear waste of time. Nothing but a glorified television film, “Second Coming” has possibilities with rich direction and a creative story, but none of that matters in what is a dull, listless, and misleading thriller with no real rewards after waiting out endless melodrama.