By Simon Thompson
Director/co-writer Jeremy Schuetze’s Anacoreta is a tepid viewing experience, which squanders an interesting premise with dull scripting and direction. Anacoreta is a movie which threatens to have atmosphere in the same way that Royston Drenthe threatened to become a world class winger – the narrative shows flashes of potential but, frustratingly it never capitalises on any of it.
Anybody who has read any of my previous reviews on this site knows that found footage movies and I go together about as well as Peter Mandelson and the truth, so Anacoreta was already on shaky ground, but even by the standards of others in the genre I have reviewed this is easily one of the weaker ones.
Anacoreta is a meta narrative about a group of friends travelling away for the weekend to an isolated rural log cabin, in an attempt by the group’s ringleader Jeremy (Jeremy Schuetze) to make a Blair Witch style found footage movie of their experiences. Tensions quickly boil over however, and soon Jeremy’s friendships and relationship with his actress girlfriend Antonia ( Antonia Thomas) reach their breaking point.
The list of problems with Anacoreta, are two-fold. The first is that none of the characters are particularly interesting, which means you can’t get invested in their inter-personal conflicts for a single minute. Jeremy, as a character, is your garden variety, sneaky, manipulative type but without any sort of charm that makes his character believable. The supporting cast basically exist to point out how much of a bastard Jeremy is and exhibit all the depth of soap opera extras.
The second issue is that the movie isn’t scary at all, made all the more frustrating by one scene involving a dead animal, that I (with my basic understanding of story structure hat on) thought would function as the inciting incident that would lead to something genuinely scary, but falls completely flat.
The acting in this movie is completely reasonable, given that Schuetze and co-writer Matt Viser’s script doesn’t give them much to work with. Antonia Thomas easily gives the best performance of the bunch, largely because her character has the semi interesting angle of being focused on her career as an actress, and how this weekend away effects that.
While a devious filmmaker trapping a group of actors and a film crew in a secluded location is an amazing idea for a film on paper, Anacoreta manages to extract no suspense from that set up at all. In contrast you’re left with feeling like you’ve just wasted eighty minutes watching the world’s dullest holiday tiff.
Anacoreta is now available on VOD platforms.
Bloody Flicks 