POLAROID (2019)

Studio:      Dimension Films
Director:    Lars Klevberg
Writer:      Blair Butler
Producer:  Roy Lee, Chris Bender, Michael Mahoney
Stars:     Kathryn Prescott, Grace Zabriskie, Tyler Young, Samantha Logan, Javier Botet, Katie Stevens, Madelaine Petsch, Priscilla Quintana, Davi Santos, Keenan Tracey, Mitch Pileggi

Review Score:

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Summary:

Several high school friends struggle to save their lives when they are targeted for death by a supernaturally cursed camera.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Teenager Sarah finds an old Polaroid camera among her dead mother’s belongings. Sarah’s friend Linda uses the camera to take Sarah’s picture. After Linda leaves, Sarah notices a shadowy figure standing behind her in the photograph. A supernatural entity attacks and kills Sarah.

Tyler Drew brings a box of yard sale items into the antique store his uncle owns. Tyler gifts Bird Fitcher, an aspiring photographer and classmate who works at the store, with the Polaroid camera. Bird tests the camera by taking Tyler’s picture. While he is alone later, the entity kills Tyler.

Bird attends a costume party with her friends Kasey, Mina, and Devin at their classmate Avery’s house. On the way, Bird notices a shadow behind Tyler in his photograph. At the party, Bird converses with her crush Connor Bell.

Bird uses the camera to take a picture of Mina, Devin, Kasey, and Connor. Bird briefly glimpses the shadowy figure when the camera flashes. Avery uses the camera to take a selfie.

Sheriff Pembroke brings Bird to the police station where she learns about Tyler’s death. Bird compares the three Polaroids and notices that the shadow moved from Tyler’s photo to Avery’s.

The entity kills Avery in her house after the party breaks up. Upon learning of Avery’s death, Bird checks the photographs again and sees that the shadow moved to Devin.

Suspicious of the camera, Bird throws it against the wall. Instead of breaking, the camera emits a supernatural shockwave that knocks Bird to the floor.

In the Locust Harbor High School cafeteria, Bird points out the moving shadow in the pictures to Kasey, Mina, Devin, and Connor. Disbelieving Bird’s claim that the camera is cursed, Devin sets the group photo on fire. As the photo burns, Mina and Kasey catch fire. Devin and Connor are unable to extinguish the flames until Bird stamps out the photo. The photo then supernaturally restores itself.

To learn more about the camera’s origin, Bird returns to the antique store to retrieve the camera’s case. The entity chases Bird out of the building. Connor notices that Bird actually appears in the group photo in a window reflection.

The entity kills Mina after Devin leaves her alone in the hospital. In his grief, Devin blames Bird for Mina’s death. This causes Bird to confide in Connor that she blames herself for the death of her father, who died in a car accident that left her with a scar on her neck when she was twelve.

A tag in the camera case reveals the camera was evidence in a 1974 homicide. Through library research, Bird and Connor learn that Roland Joseph Sable, a former photography teacher at their high school, abducted and murdered three students. Bird connects Roland to the initial ‘RJS’ on the case and concludes he used the camera to photograph his victims. Bird also discovers the police shot and killed Roland before he could be taken into custody.

Bird, Connor, Devin, and Kasey regroup. Bird recalls the entity becoming blurry when it was near heat, prompting her to theorize the creature can only develop in darkness like a photograph.

Still distraught, Devin wrestles Connor for possession of the camera. Connor accidentally takes Devin’s picture in the struggle. Everyone sees the shadow move to the new photograph.

Devin takes the camera and threatens to photograph someone else so he doesn’t die next. Kasey stops him by poking a pencil through Devin’s new photo, which puts a hole in Devin’s hand until the photograph supernaturally reforms.

Devin ends up arrested after he inadvertently strikes a police officer in the commotion. Bird and Connor try explaining the curse to Sheriff Pembroke, who merely warns the teens to stay away from Roland Joseph Sable’s house. The entity later kills Devin while he is alone in his jail cell.

Bird and Connor visit Roland’s widow Lena. Lena explains that the camera actually belonged to their troubled daughter Rebecca Jane Sable. Lena recounts how four classmates bullied Rebecca by taking humiliating photos with her prized possession and passing them around school. The incident drove Rebecca to hang herself. Roland became obsessed with punishing the four kids for their cruelty, driving him to abduct and murder them. Police killed Roland while he was still holding the camera. Lena gives Bird the photograph of the fourth bully who survived.

Bird, Connor, and Kasey meet at the high school. Matching Lena’s Polaroid to an old yearbook photo, Bird discovers that the victim who got away was Thomas Pembroke.

Sheriff Pembroke arrives to arrest the trio for breaking and entering. Thinking that the curse will end when the entity finishes exacting vengeance, Connor takes Pembroke’s picture to make him the new target.

Pembroke tells the teens that Lena lied to them. Pembroke explains that Rebecca Sable’s father actually took the sexually explicit photographs. Pembroke and his friends were attempting to rescue Rebecca and get the evidence to the police, but Roland went after them to avoid being exposed. Guilt drove Rebecca to kill herself after her father already committed the murders.

The entity manifests and tears Pembroke’s photo in two, which causes the sheriff to violently split in half. After a chase, the entity drags Connor away. Bird takes a photo of herself with the camera to draw the entity to her instead.

The entity chases Bird to the photography lab. Bird takes the entity’s picture. Bird crumples the Polaroid, which causes the entity to collapse, but also breaks her hand since her fingers were in the frame. The contorted creature crawls toward Bird until she sets fire to the photo. The entity disintegrates.

Bird, Connor, and Kasey recover. Bird throws the Polaroid camera into a lake.

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Review:

Dimension Films has a bad habit of snapping up horror movies only to leave them languishing on a neglected shelf somewhere in unreleased limbo. Just ask Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who are still waiting for the North American debut of their 2011 film “Livide” (review here).

Norwegian director Lars Klevberg’s “Polaroid” began serving its sentence in distribution prison in 2015. That’s when Dimension optioned the rights to Klevberg’s award-winning short of the same name with an eye toward turning it into a feature.

One year later, Dimension announced an August 2017 release date and principal photography commenced. In April 2017, “Polaroid” revealed a promotional poster. When the first trailer dropped in June however, the projected opening date had skipped a few months to December.

No one was shocked when Dimension changed the release target yet again. They were surprised that the company actually moved it up for once. By October 2017, Dimension claimed audiences now had only one month to wait, as “Polaroid” would finally hit theaters over Thanksgiving weekend.

The very next day, Hollywood headlines were dominated by news of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Given Dimension’s association with The Weinstein Company, their slate suddenly became riddled with question marks and shrugged shoulders. “Polaroid” became another casualty of the fallout, retargeted for a vague 2018 release assuming the company could recover.

Dimension didn’t recover. With bankruptcy assets subsequently being scavenged, Netflix entered the wheeling and dealing game with a proposal to acquire “Polaroid.” As though cursed by its own camera, “Polaroid” still couldn’t catch a break. One of the film’s financiers filed a motion to block the sale in October 2018 over a matter regarding who really owned the rights. Back into the darkroom went “Polaroid.”

Netflix dropped out of the deal by the time the calendar turned to 2019. Someone else obtained international distribution rights though, and “Polaroid” finally appeared on Amazon, in Germany anyway. Although other regions technically still had an indefinite wait, viewers with a VPN or imported disc could at last see the movie two years after originally planned.

One of the lesser side effects of a situation like this is that these titles assume the burden of unfair expectations. In addition to distribution woes clouding conversations, these films take on faintly mythic status as movies that must have something extraordinary going on given all the hullaballoo.

But as is almost always the case with Dimension’s produced-then-shelved horror titles, these movies are mostly plain and simple PG-13 affairs never aspiring to be anything other than average. That’s certainly the case with “Polaroid,” an unambitious fright flick that’s formulaic from start to finish, yet still evens out as a strictly serviceable supernatural chiller.

The setup starts with high school student Bird Fitcher. She’s an aspiring photographer of course, which becomes convenient for a story centered on a cursed camera. Bird gets some cursory backstory regarding a neck scar she is ashamed of, a father who died five years ago, and an overworked mother struggling for more time with her daughter. “Polaroid” misses the parallel it strains to make here with a dead character introduced later. End credits instead prove the irrelevance of all of this by giving Bird’s mother the “who cares?” name ‘Bird’s Mother.’

Bird’s interchangeable classmates are more crucial to what happens next. Her crush Connor could use an upgrade in the charisma department, coming off as having a beige personality behind an inoffensively handsome face. Teen thrillers usually round out their rosters with the sexpot, jock, nerd, and smart aleck stereotypes. Bird just gets Avery, Devin, Mina, and Kasey, who aren’t any more describable than that.

“Polaroid” puts at least one person too many in Bird’s orbit. The extent of BFF Kasey’s development involves two throwaway lines inferring trouble at home because Kasey is gay. After that, Blair Butler’s straight arrow script struggles with where to put her while everyone else advances the plot. Kasey gets separated from the group when a nurse asks her to hang behind for a checkup, when she goes off alone to do research, and is paused yet again by a simple “wait here.”

Problems pop up when Bird comes into possession of an old Polaroid camera. After snapping a few pics of her friends, Bird spots a shadowy shape moving from one photo to the next. She doesn’t think much of it until her friends start dying according to whose picture hosts the entity. Taking cues from any number of J-horror influences, Bird and her friends find themselves targeted by a curse. The only way to break it is to solve the mystery of the murderous ghost captured inside the camera.

In between its tame death scenes, which are simply redundantly drawn out moments where a character creeps toward a dark corner for a scare, “Polaroid” connects common dots to fill up its runtime. A pointless prologue starts the film with a bang, even though its inclusion doesn’t have any consequence. Exposition dumps come courtesy of a library research montage and arrival of an old woman who fills in leftover blanks before act three can take off. Whatever “Polaroid” does, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve seen it done before.

“Polaroid” also includes an intriguing twist that somewhat salvages a predictable plot before the conclusion becomes too cliché. Although everything above makes “Polaroid” sound rote, which it is, what we’re really talking about here is a purposefully pedestrian thriller intentionally engineered for mainstream mediocrity. Basically, “Polaroid” is the kind of milquetoast movie that would fare better if it were held against the lower standards of Syfy filler.

But you know what? That’s “fine,” which doubles as a suitable adjective for describing “Polaroid.” It’s no better or worse than any other horror movie made out of attractive actors, routine scripting, and standard spooks a la “The Bye Bye Man” (review here) or “Ouija” (review here). It may play like a TV movie of the week, but “Polaroid” at least possesses the visual polish of a palatably theatrical production.

Review Score: 50

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