FrightFest Review – The Entity

La Entidad (The Entity) A Peruvian found footage horror film, which will play okay at genre festivals and with aficionados of the form but perhaps isn’t strikingly original enough in concept to earn an English-language remake.  Relatively aimless film student Joshua (Rodrigo Falla) is urged by his ex-girlfriend Carla (the very striking Danielle Mendoza) to make a project about ‘reaction videos’, internet postings which show people reacting as they watch horrific true-life film clips.  With irritating cut-up Benjamin (Mario Gaviria) and more serious Lucas (Carlos Casella), Joshua and Carla investigate a particular clip … only to find that the three people in it have died since witnessing an unspecified horror.  The investigation leads then to an encounter with something nebulous in a graveyard that has been used for rituals and to an escalating series of supernatural phenomena caught on film, with a rising and gruesome body count.  The backstory involves a woman tortured to death by the Inquisition, and impossible film footage of this incident in which the various contemporary characters see their own faces when the hood is taken off the garrotted victim.  There is an additional twist beside the familiar found footage of stirring up a paranormal hornets’ nest and suffering the consequences, set up by a few sly looks and throwaway lines from one of the principles, which requires a flashback montage near the end to make the plot point stick.  With broad strokes characterisations, halfway decent halfseen demons and nice use of locations that are full of arcane clutter (a cavernous university library, the graveyard), it’s a decent enough effort but likely to just go on the pile of similar films.  Directed by Eduardo Schuldt, scripted by Sandro Ventura from a story by Schuldt.