The film starts off with this woman coming to Bulgaria. She describes a reason to be there, to be involved in the creation of a movie. It all seems pretty trustworthy. I can believe that this is happening for real.
But before I get ahead of myself, the film really starts with what’s said in an intro, where it’s determined that the footage that we are about to see is found footage, and that it has not been altered in any way, kind of like the usual found footage thing.
I feel that the initial actress is pretty good. I can believe that this is for real. She describes the other characters in the movie. She has this kind of dossier of the other involved actresses and actors. There are also a few of the behind-the-scenes personalities in that file. So already, from beforehand, we start to get to know these other characters that I assume will arrive in the story soon. My understanding is that the story will take this to a darker place, as it is a kind of horror found footage movie, which the intro already has made absolutely clear of course.
As far as the other actors or actresses are concerned, I think that I identified a couple of them from other movies based on the dossier. So far it’s very hard to say if the acting will hold up or not, but I think that at least in the first 10–15 minutes, it’s pretty solid. It’s not that it’s exciting or really suspenseful yet, but I think we need that time to introduce the storyline and the characters. And as it is about 40 minutes long, I think that something will start to happen pretty soon.
It should, because we have a kind of different time frame when it comes to shorter movies. This is somewhere in between a short movie and a full-length movie, I think. I have the sense that a full length movie should be about 70 minutes. There’s some kind of rule about it, I’m not sure.
It’s kind of suggested that it is a psychological ghost-type found footage movie, but I think that some of the transitions through the footage don’t really add to the suspense or the flow of the movie. So maybe some of these scenes might have been beneficial to be cut out, to raise the pace of the movie a little bit, because it kind of drags on a bit before something really exciting happens.
Then, finally. about halfway through the movie, they’re on their way to shoot some shots, and the road is closed, so they need to take a detour. They’re supposed to be there early, and this detour will result in them being late. But there’s really no turning back. Once they started the trip they need to go there. And after a while, they find some abandoned buildings, and the actress in the beginning, who was on the way with the driver to the shoot, wants to explore the surroundings.
So they stop the car, and they say that they will look around for about 10 minutes, and then they need to go. There is something really exciting about abandoned buildings. I think they’re abandoned for real. They should be, and I think that there’s got to be a lot of locations like this in Bulgaria, where I believe the film is set and shot.
Don’t forget the other films by this director. The Whisper and Whispers films also have a pretty recurring use of abandoned buildings in them, and I think it’s a pretty cheap way to achieve some mysterious effects. It’s very easy to set an eerie feeling in an abandoned building or building-type location. I think it’s very effective, and I think it starts getting really interesting when these abandoned buildings are being explored.
When the action in the horror sequences starts to take off, I feel that it’s not particularly logical though. These two people, the behind-the-camera woman and the driver, are alone in the location with no one else around. Then they find this mask, and then it disappears. Okay, so far so good. They start to try to get away from there, and suddenly a guy shows up with a flat tire. It’s the middle of nowhere. Why is there another car there anyway?
Of course, she sees people, or she claims to see people. He doesn’t believe her, and it goes from there. They are trying to escape from the place when this masked killer turns up and, well, tries to kill them. I think it might be kind of the stupidest way to confront the killer, to go and see if it’s dead. You know, if it’s Jason Voorhees, you wouldn’t go and check on his health before you get the hell out of there. Of course, this isn’t Jason Voorhees, but it’s kind of the same thing. You wouldn’t take the time to check on a maniac killer if he is alive and try to call the police. You would just try to get the hell out of there.
Then, a little later, when—how should I put this to not spoil it too much—there are obviously other people in the area as well, and I don’t know where they are coming from, because it is an abandoned location, kind of in the middle of nowhere. So why is there another car there, with a couple of guys drinking beer all of a sudden? Why didn’t they see them before? What are they doing there? Are they accomplices in the same plot to kill or scare or whatever this woman? Is it even planned as some kind of snuff scenario? At this point, there are too many questions to be answered.
The movie also suffers from the same problem that almost every found footage movie struggles with. Why do they keep on filming when they are chased by a murderer, a monster, or whatever? Why don’t they just throw the camera away and run for their lives?
As a whole I found Recorded interesting. I liked it, there are some very effective elements in it but it’s also totally illogical to me. I kinda of feel the weight on ends of the scale. It’s absolutely a watchable kind of scary found footage slasher but it’s also something that make me question the internal logic of the film’s world.
