We Are Still Here (2015)
(In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I started hoping for writer-director Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here to be good from its opening moments, as it heads deep in wintry upstate New York and, in doing so, looks a whole lot like the rural Quebec and Ontario landscape in which I grew up. The idea of horror in a farmhouse, isolated in the middle of winter, carries a far more familiar weight for me than countless warmer settings, and I really wanted We Are Still Here to be good. Alas, it takes more than snowdrifts and iced windows to make a good horror film: the cinema-vérité style of the direction quickly became irritating, and the pile-up of familiar elements did nothing to help. The premise, as thin as it is, has a middle-aged couple moving to a house while grieving for their son, and slowly coming to realize that the house demands sacrifices. I’m not necessarily against horror clichés when they’re well done, but I found myself more bored than entertained by We Are Still Here. The revelations seemed obvious, the acting too naturalistic for my tastes, and the entire thing too dull to be interesting. The setting is great and the cinematography (by noted Quebec-based Karim Hussain) is often wonderfully evocative, but the rest… not so much.