{"id":21768,"date":"2016-08-08T00:55:27","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T04:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=21768"},"modified":"2020-07-29T11:10:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T15:10:38","slug":"therapy-2016-fantasia-international-film-festival-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/08\/therapy-2016-fantasia-international-film-festival-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Therapy (2016) [Fantasia International Film Festival 2016]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"therapy\"<\/a>A Night watchman finds blood and camera equipment in an abandoned property on a land he was hired to patrol by developers.\u00a0 He turns these in to the local police who go through the hours of recorded evidence.\u00a0 On these, they find a group of campers being terrorized and picked off one by one.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sixteen year old writer and director Nathan Ambrosioni mixes regular film style with found footage to mixed results.\u00a0 Here he takes the youth in peril tropes and pairs them with a cop mystery and some unfortunate found footage.\u00a0 The story and characters are fairly basic with a killer that looks mostly good but does very little on screen.\u00a0 The characters are quickly introduced and given relationships, just enough to try make the viewers care about their fates, and then they are picked off in what could be considered horrible ways if we fully saw what happened to all of them.\u00a0 The characters are basic in a fairly thin plot, what saves the story from being just another bland found footage film are the police procedural scenes peppered throughout.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cast here is mostly unknown which is a necessity for found footage film to work.\u00a0 However, given the mix of found footage and regular police procedural style, this may not have been needed.\u00a0 Also, most of the cast is relatively unknown unless you have seen Ambrosioni\u2019s previous found footage effort Hostile.\u00a0 The cast composed of Ambrosioni himself, Vanessa Azzopardi, Luna Belan, Nathalie Couturier, Julien Croquet, etc does well with the material they are given.\u00a0 Some of the performances are a bit one note, but the characters are simple enough that they do not require extraordinary range.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cinematography here is painful.\u00a0 So much shaky found footage, it\u2019s just not visually appealing.\u00a0 The non-ff scenes are also shot with some shaking and sketchy framing.\u00a0 The reviewer\/photographer wanted to grab cinematographer Fabrice Ambrosioni and sit him down with other movies shot in the same sub-genre but in visually attractive ways.\u00a0 \u00a0Headache inducing should never be a goal, even with found footage.\u00a0 For an example of how to shoot the sub-genre properly, Troll Hunter is one where this is done so well.<\/span><\/p>\n

The special effects by Laureen Kaczmarek and Melanie Rathelot are simple but work within their scenes so, as props are given where props are due, they deserve to have their work noted. No matter the story or scene, the simple and effective blood work is good and fits with the killer and his victims.\u00a0 The killer\u2019s design is not going to re-invigorate the genre, but his Michael Myers-like suit is decent and the simple mask is creepy, giving us a killer that is pretty imposing and works best in the dark.\u00a0 His look and outfit are fairly good, but they do remind of so many other killers that they lack any kind of originality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Therapy is better than Nathan Ambrosioni\u2019s previous offering Hostile which played Fantasia in 2015; however it\u2019s not by much, his style and filmmaking knowledge are evolving and getting better, given he\u2019s only 16 years old, he has plenty years ahead of him to learn more and get much better.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be following his evolution but might wait a while before watching another of his films, especially if he stays in the overdone and tired found footage sub-genre.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fantasia International Film Festival ran from July 14th<\/sup> until August 3rd<\/sup>, 2016 and will be back in the summer of 2017.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Night watchman finds blood and camera equipment in an abandoned property on a land he was hired to patrol by developers.\u00a0 He turns these in to the local police who go through the hours of recorded evidence.\u00a0 On these, they find a group of campers being terrorized and picked off one by one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497,1284,12],"tags":[367,370,477,703,950,1020],"class_list":["post-21768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasia-fest","category-festivalsevents","category-movie-reviews","tag-foreign","tag-found-footage","tag-horror","tag-mystery","tag-slasher","tag-t"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21768"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21976,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21768\/revisions\/21976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}