PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I love mind-bending films. Seriously. There’s just something great about a film that you need to watch a few times to catch all the hidden messages. On the other hand, there is such a thing as being over complicated to the point that your message is lost, which is a shame when the rest of the movie is great. This is the case with Bruce Wemple’s (The Retreat 2020 – read our review here) Lake Artifact.
Synopsis:
Five friends go on a weekend getaway to a cabin in upstate New York where time and space begins to function without reason, only to slowly turn them against each other one by one.
Lake Artifact is run in the form of a kind of mockumentary/feature film hybrid, which is a style I haven’t seen before, and loved. It was narrated by the brilliant character actor Rick Montgomery Jr. (Crazed). He talks about how, back in 1953 at Paradox Lake in upstate New York, a local cult was responsible for a bloodbath. We then go to the meat of the story, which is about the five friends (Sheila Ball, Thomas Brazzle, Adrian Burke, Chris Cimperman, and Catharine Daddario) who go for a weekend away to Paradox Lake. But after a drunken night of partying, things get weird.
I loved a good 85 percent of Lake Artifact. The characters are engaging, the plot is fascinating, and I genuinely wanted to know what was going to happen. But if I have watched your film three times and I still have to look up “Explain what happened in the movie…” immediately afterwards, then there is definitely a problem with your presentation. And there are films where non-linear concepts work very well like Convergence and Triangle, but this is not one of them.
If there were just a few less balls in the air in Lake Artifact, this film would be truly great. There some amazing scenes of gore, and many found footage fans might fight the film interesting. And hey, do you enjoy a challenge? Give this film a try! Let me know what your theory on it is.
