David Bruckner

  • The Signal (2007)

    The Signal (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) Even though there have been many, many horror movies about electronic signals turning people crazy, I still hold out hope that, some day, someone will manage to make a worthwhile movie out of it. Even after watching The Signal, I’m still waiting. A hodgepodge of ideas badly stuck together, it does have some residual interest… but it doesn’t take a long time for the usual horror silliness to undermine the ideas. In true genre fashion, writers-directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry seem more interested in gore and cheap scares than in exploring any of the ideas they may have started with. It doesn’t really help that the film is structured along three shorter films, and that much of the film focuses on TV signals, probably as a visual device. While the result is much narratively tighter than most anthology films, it’s still a disappointment. There is a good case to be made that the filmmakers were interested in showing people being violent to one another, and that the TV thing was just a thin justification on top of what they wanted to do anyway, and I’d go for that… except that stripped of its rationale, The Signal is another one of those cheap horror films that seem to find inherent worth in violence, which is where I disagree. Instead, it feels like so many forgettable films, the madness of its characters poorly motivated and ultimately leading to nothing but more red syrup spilling out. It’s striking that such a great idea, reflective of our ambivalent relationship with technology, hasn’t managed to produce at least one great horror film where the metaphor is made literal. Maybe some day…

  • The Ritual (2017)

    The Ritual (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, August 2018) Oh no, four guys go hiking in the woods in another country! Oh no, one of them gets injured! Oh no, they take a shortcut off the map! Oh no, they see weird things! Oh no, strange people surround them! Oh no, I don’t think this is going to end well! … that’s right, The Ritual is just about the most ordinary film about the most ordinary horror elements you can think of. Rafe Spall stars, David Bruckner directs and the audience endures. There’s a whole lot of nonsense in the film that makes it hard to care about any of it—the moment that hallucinations come into any horror movie, then it’s a free license for the filmmakers to do anything and everything, considerably lowering the stakes. A description of this film’s monster ends up causing a big “so what”. The Ritual isn’t that scary, isn’t that funny, isn’t that anything. It’s thoroughly mediocre in the most average sense of the word. I suppose it will do the trick for those looking for familiar thrills—I mean, it’s not that bad—, but it doesn’t really doesn’t go anywhere beyond that.