FrightFest review – Healing Andy
Another Youtubers/influencers nightmare getaway film, done in found footage style. Either horror film culture really hates these people or these people gravitate towards appearing in horror films.
The hook here is that Andy (Matthew Kay) is a wreck after his fiancee dumped him and his pal Holger (Frederick Lysegaard) opts to take him on his Italian honeymoon anyway – taking along his guy pals Malcolm (Samuel Nunes de Souza) and Maverick (Elliott Eason) – to give him an adventure which will cheer him up. Andy is initially not keen on the idea and even shows up at the airport wearing a false beard, but is instantly smitten with Ginger (Gemma Acosta), who greets them and shows them around their rented luxury villa … and persuades the guys to go into town because there’s a strong possibility of meeting up with her for a party, which naturally gets out of hand and not in the way they expected. An occult angle creeps in with a sinister cult and an apparent item of great power known as the Eye of God (which Andy gives away to someone who loses it) but there’s also the possibility that Ginger is just a maniacal trickster (Acosta is the strongest, strangest thing in the film) out to ruin the lives of these hapless boobs.
There’s thinly-veiled criticism of Holger, who is genuinely out to help his pal but still sees an opportunity to go viral by putting Andy’s journey of healing online. An unusual found footage fillip is intercutting the phone-cam material Holger livestreamed at the time (peppered with comments and emoji – a convention of these influencers-in-hell pics which must require filmmakers to spend a lot of time thinking up handles and making the crassest, most stupid remarks imaginable all to scroll past double-quick) with recovered footage that fills in the blanks when bad stuff was happening without a reliable cloud connection. The characters are all engaging enough that their sufferings aren’t just a sadistic spectacle for audiences who might hatewatch the assholier variety of TikTuber and we do get some depth to their laddish group dynamic – but I wouldn’t be surprised if any follow-ups ditch the guys to give us more of Ginger, who could be a breakout psycho for the 2020s or at least land Acosta high-visibility roles in a kind of Parker Posey-possessed-by-Pazuzu sort of way.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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