New on digital download and On Demand from Terror Films!

REPORTAGE NOVEMBER (2022)

Directed by Carl Sundström.
Written by Nathaniel P. Erlandsson, Carl Sundström.
Starring Mikael Björklund, Isabel Camacho, Signe Elvin-Nowak, Marianna Ilona, Jonatan Jönsson, Svante Jönsson, Jonas Lundström, Petra Ottosson, Ulla Rasmussen, Sabina Renck, Bengt Sanzén, Patrick Sundelin, Camilla Westman, Cristian Åsvik, Johannes Yachouh, and Erik Sundström as the creature!
Find out more about this film here!!

After a mother and child go missing on the edge of a deep forest in Sweden, the mother’s body is found in a bizarre physical condition. Though the authorities attest that they’ve searched the entire woods for clues, an investigative team decide to venture in armed with only a handful of cameras and a yearning for uncovering the truth. But they are not prepared with what they find once they get lost in the woods.

REPORTAGE NOVEMBER’s adverts describe the film as a Swedish BLAIR WITCH and that’s a pretty appropriate description. The film has all of the good and bad aspects of the iconic found footage film. There is a lot of walking in the woods, a lot of camera shots of people sitting around a campfire, and then a lot of people running around confused and terrified when things go wrong. Much of this film has the same problem of filler that most found footage has, which often reserve the scary or horrifying moments for the very end. The question is, is the wait worth it?

This film does deliver some very claustrophobic scenes towards the end as the search culminates with the investigators holing up in a ramshackle house in the middle of the woods full of corridors and junk. It also has a pretty creepy monster in it. The monster is only shown in the distance through a shaky lens, but the moments leading up to the reveal are quite tension filled. The movie does a good job of building suspense and littering clues along the path, leading the investigators into the unknown. Still, most of the stuff here has been done before.

These found footagers are quite cheap to make, which is why there are so many of them. This one at least has an ominous story leading up to the climax and a few worthwhile scenes of shock. While the entity prowling the forest isn’t revolutionary, it does manage to be somewhat unique and vague enough for you to fill in all kinds of horrifying things tying these elements together. REPORTAGE NOVEMBER also does a decent job of maintaining the found footage to make it feel authentically found and not produced, though the beginning of it is filmed in a documentary style. It ain’t bad, but it ain’t original either. REPORTAGE NOVEMBER is going to be for those who have no qualms with the found footage genre and don’t mind watching a movie they could have sworn they have seen before in another language.

Check out the trailer here!!