Well it's not like this type of thing has not been known to happen.
The fact that the son does it at the end implies it's a Paimon thing. It signifies that Paimon is inhabiting whoever is doing the clucking.
Yeah I saw this in the cinema and that first moment of the grandma in the corner absolutely set the tone for the rest of the movie. I was on EDGE, which made everything else afterward more powerful.
Oh yeah, that scene of her finding the note and seeing the grandmother in the shadows, I was in. The movie was speaking my language.
Amen! My favorite kind of horror too, by far.
Kind of my experience as well. I was super hyped about the movie but hadn't even watched a trailer (was hyped due to word of mouth). But... the movie fell flat for me. I didn't find it scary at all. I thought the acting of the son was super weak and sometimes even annoying (then again teenagers are supposed to be annoying so I guess he was doing a good job?), Byrne was completely wasted as an actor (kind of reminded me of the dad in Stranger Things that's barely even there), and whatever sense of dread or creepiness was being built would be thrown away a few seconds or minutes later: the beheading was ridiculous, the mom crawling on the walls looked so out of place, then floating, etc. Honestly the parts with the miniature of the grandma, and the old naked people standing still around the house were the only scenes to make me feel uneasy.
Heh, same here. I mean, it's not like any of the characters were even remotely interesting to me, so why wouldn't I want the demon to be conjured and these bunch of paper bags to be eliminated? Not that there was really any pay-off to the summoning either. The final scene is just... not there. The kid is looking shocked/confused even though the demon is now supposed to be in him (her? they call him Charlie, right?), so... what, it didn't work? Did it? There's no tension in that scene at all, just... awkwardness? I know it's unfair to compare this to Rosemary's Baby, but... come on! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv3p8kIyqLI
Best part about that was the audience slowly realizing and pointing to the figure to their friends who hadn't seen it yet.
That scene really got me, just them showing it so casually. Really had me creeped out for the rest of the movie.
Maybe I'm just desensitized to scary shit at this point, but this didn't seem scary at all. Loved the acting and the way everything was shot though. Hate the bullshit we get so often where there's like 50 cuts in a single scene. The way it was shot also worked really well with the whole idea involving miniatures too, even if it gave us weird lines like
Ending was odd though. Like, I paid enough attention that I understood what happened when the son basically died after leaping out the window, but it all boiled down to whether or not the audience paid attention to a single page in a book the mom was flipping through. If you paid attention for like 5 seconds of a 2 hour movie, you understood what the grandma and all these nutty characters were doing, and what would happen as soon as the son died. That seems like a strange approach.
And nothing else is really explained. Maybe I'll learn more by skimming through a Wikipedia article about Paimon, but I don't understand why he was still behaving strangely when in the correct body. Did Charlie ever really exist in the daughter's body, or was it always Paimon? What was with all the beheadings? Why was the mom doing crazy shit when sleep walking? Why wasn't Paimon capable of inhabiting the grandmother's son when he killed himself? It just kind of feels like most movies where they scraped together an ending as quickly as possible to push the movie out the door with all the naked dead people flying around. Like, I audibly said "whoa" when it took me awhile to notice the mom in the top left corner of the room when the son wakes up for the last time right after the dad's burned, but then every scene after that turns into Where's Waldo? with a random naked ghost hiding somewhere in a dark corner in every scene just smiling at the camera as if to say to the audience, "nice job, you found me."
Just... Everything's explained away as cultist shit. Why'd they go through so much trouble to kill the kid the way they did? How hard is it to find a male body for a spirit to inhabit? And who gets to reap the reward? The one woman in the cult still alive?
And to top it off, way to go the easy route of having the evil thing in the movie have a unique noise they make. Did this start with Ju-On, or even further back? All I know is I've seen it in Ju-On with the throat noise, The Conjuring with the clap, The Babadook with the "Babadook-ook-ook", and now this with the tongue clicking. I'm sure there's more, but it seems kind of lazy is all.
Is the demonic posession caused by mental illness or is the mental illness caused by demonic possession?
Which of course ties into the miniatures imagery and aesthetic
This is a perfect example of why no film can ever be perfect. I loved the last 15 minutes, and I think it totally made the movie for me.
