MY CALL: This film came out of nowhere and blew away viewer expectations by bringing us smart characters, a creepiness that developed with the story, and a not-so color by numbers plot. Very good horror film. MOVIES LIKE The Taking of Deborah Logan: Try Oculus (2014) and The Babadook (2014) if you’re looking for recent releases that break the mold.
The Taking of Deborah Logan tells a story that we haven’t already heard a dozen times and it tells the story well. Deborah (Jill Larson; Shutter Island) is a charming early stage Alzheimer’s disease patient living with her anxious caregiving daughter (Anne Ramsay; Planet of the Apes, Critters 4). In exchange for much needed financial compensation, they agree to let PhD student Mia (Michelle Ang; Underemployed) and her audio-visual team stay with them, record them, and study the effects Alzheimer’s disease has on the unafflicted surrounding family members.
Isn’t Mia a cute, spunky little grad student?
Something that I always must point out is when a horror movie does a good job of getting to know its characters and getting us to like them and invest in their well-being. From the very start, I wanted to learn more about Deborah, her daughter, and the academic team studying them. First-time feature-length director Adam Robitel did such a GREAT job, in fact, that it didn’t feel like a horror movie at all at first…and I didn’t care. If this movie turned out to be a family drama I still would have wanted to see these characters develop. What’s more is that the story in no way relied on the characters’ stupid decisions to move forward. The story unfolded as the characters, in fact, made wise or at least credible decisions in an incredible situation. Amazing job–and a great storytelling victory for the horror genre to close out 2014.
Mia’s team watches as Deborah’s episodes and symptoms worsen at an accelerating rate and, with these episodes’ intensity, we also see a greater and more frequent danger to Mia’s team. The characters great freaked out for good reasons, and things just keep getting creepier and weirder as we begin to learn more about what is causing Deborah’s disease to become so aggressive and more about her mysterious history with her close friend living next door. The story finds good synthesis, great creepiness, and appropriately effective gore and shock value without trying to compete with overblown shock cinema.
This film was rich with scares and all of them for legitimate reasons….no loud noises and camera angles to spur needless jumps. The scares had effective, creepy build-up and even when you saw them coming they were still shocking. What’s more is that the shocks and their creepy build-ups both appropriately amplify as the movie shifts from its subtle beginnings to its moderately intense end.
Yeah…it gets pretty weird.
You may have noticed that I have gone out of my way to reveal EXTREMELY little about this film (other than the photos in this review). Why? Well, it’s one of the best horror films of 2014 and it deserves to not be spoiled….and YOU deserve to be surprised. Just know this—it’s NOT a found footage film although there is a good deal of documentary style filming/camera-work, it is supernatural in nature, and it’s something of a horror mystery.
See this movie. Right now it’s on Netflix.
