Studio: Lionsgate
Director: Pablo Absento
Writer: Pablo Absento
Producer: Ben McKenzie, Timur Bekmambetov, Maria Zatulovskaya, Marie Garrett, Gilles Sousa
Stars: Ben McKenzie, Bojana Novakovic, Malcolm Fuller, Sawyer Jones, Kane Kosugi, Royce Johnson
Review Score:
Summary:
Forced to watch events unfold remotely, a military officer sees his youngest son become possessed by a supernatural entity while his family vacations in Japan.
Review:
“Bloat” presents its narrative as a “found footage” film. More specifically, it’s “found footage” of the “screenlife” variety, which means the movie unfolds through various windows featuring FaceTime calls, videos, webpages, and text message boxes on a computer monitor.
Reluctantly, I have to give “Bloat” a bit of credit here. It’s still a formulaic fright film, although technically it breaks the typical “found footage” mold by being about a supernatural possession rather than a haunted asylum or haunted woods investigation (though there are two shaky cam scenes that occur in a forest). I can’t consistently complain about “found footage” routinely being one trip after another through rundown buildings and then not give a courtesy clap when someone does something slightly different, after all.
I suppose I should also acknowledge “Bloat” for sidestepping another common pet peeve of mine. After rolling my eyes, I often wag a finger when scripts use unnatural conversations to forcibly croak out exposition where people are referred to by relationship instead of by first names, or major events in the past are established as though characters are hearing about them for the first time.
Instead of spoken words, “Bloat” gets viewers up to speed with successive screens that fill the same function. I can’t fathom why anyone would keep such a video let alone ever want to relive its memory, but in the film’s first sequence, main man Jack watches footage of his wife delivering a stillborn baby. Immediately after, Jack browses a website for information on how to heal from trauma. Jack’s wife Hannah then texts, “Jack, we lost our child, she’s gone,” followed by Jack searching travel locations and Airbnb options for a much-needed family getaway. At least viewers aren’t forced to sit through awkward dialogue exchanges to get this background, I guess?
If nothing else, and there really isn’t much else when it comes to “Bloat,” this conceit can lead to some downright comical scenes. My money for most unintentionally hilarious moment comes when Jack decides to go on a bender. Having hit his boiling point, Jack Googles “nearest bar,” clicks the Reset button on his computer’s “145 days” sobriety counter, then stomps away as the camera zooms in on a digital clock cycling furiously forward while a blitz of alcohol-related transaction notifications piles up underneath. Still unrealistic, but better than the stilted alternative it’s replacing, I guess?
In most of his scenes, Jack wears U.S. Army fatigues. During his final appearance, Jack wears a Marine uniform. He’s also identified as a NATO officer on more than one occasion, so let’s just call him a military man of some sort. Jack’s service status is as all over the place as the trip he arranges for his family to specifically visit Tokyo, yet includes locations like Kawaguchi Lake and Kyoto, the latter of which is over 280 miles away from their destination. It’s tough to tell if “Bloat’s” left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing, or if the movie means for details to be so scattershot.
Jack would have joined his wife Hannah in Japan, except he’s unexpectedly called back to active duty to deal with unrest in the Middle East. Jack just operates drones, which seems like something he could do on any laptop from any location, a fact highlighted by how he drops bombs on terrorist targets while concurrently chastising his older son Steve for using curse words during a video call. Nevertheless, Jack’s absence leaves him to view events remotely when the couple’s other son Kyle nearly dies in a drowning accident.
Kyle survives, but his new lease on life contains a rider for bizarre behavior. In short order, Kyle begins biting his brother, devouring cucumbers like he’s Bugs Bunny whittling down carrots, and texting messages in Japanese despite not knowing the language. Uh oh. If you’ve seen a single horror film before, you know this means the boy is possessed, and the culprit in this case is Kappa, a frog figure from local folklore who wants to swallow Kyle’s soul while his frightened father observes helplessly from across the ocean.
“Found footage” became its own subgenre because it’s a one-of-a-kind format for making audiences experience terror like no other type of movie can. It puts viewers into a first-person perspective where they can live vicariously through another person’s eyes.
Theoretically, the “screenlife” offshoot should provide a similar effect, except it flattens the 3D POV by confining everything to a two-dimensional screen. That screen builds a barrier between us and the action, adding a middleman whose presence puts us another degree away from immersion. As a result, we end up passively watching someone else’s experience rather than experiencing a simulation for ourselves. This limits “screenlife” as a storytelling tool, and the straightforward story “Bloat” tells is one that isn’t fit for the format.
Another problem posed by this setup is the actors have no one to act with. Jack’s interactions with his wife, who always has a glass of wine in her hand whenever he calls, don’t sound like two people speaking organically. They sound like two people reading rehearsed lines, likely because they’re reacting to prerecorded footage when a live human in the same room would have fostered more drama to draw on.
Once the slight shininess of “Bloat’s” “screenlife” sheen gets dulled, it’s even easier to see the movie as a rote possession yarn that’s only going through basic motions. Forget about the foreign locale or framing device offering illusive distractions. The plotline follows a predictable pattern involving internet research, the serendipitous discovery of someone in a similar situation who can fill in final blanks, and more mundane mumbo jumbo with next to no inherent excitement. Even an attention span that slows down to a still-engaged idle should fully shut off as soon as “Bloat” plops a sour cherry on top with an absurdly unrewarding ending that outs the effort as a loose idea in search of fulfilling fiction it doesn’t find.
Review Score: 35
Once the slight shininess of “Bloat’s” “screenlife” sheen gets dulled, it’s even easier to see the movie as a rote possession yarn.