Heartland: Anacoreta

A mildly experimental take on found footage.

For Heartland Film Festival showtimes and tickets, click here.

I’ve never really been huge on the found footage genre. I recently had the pleasure of revisiting The Blair Witch Project for my podcast, and it holds up really well — unfortunately, the genre craze it started has yet to rise to the simple heights it achieved.

Too often, found footage horror is a collection of cheap jump scares and an absurd piling-on of tension that either a.) becomes far too overblown for its humble, lo-fi beginnings, or b.) ultimately amounts to nothing. I’d place Anacoreta closer to the latter category, though it’s admirably ambitious in its concept, which helps to elevate it above most of the genre’s wide-release dreck—the Paranormal Activity’s and the V/H/S’s and such.

We follow a group of friends who head to the woods for a weekend of filmmaking. They want to try something different; something experimental. They’re treating it like a normal weekend of hanging out and vacationing, “being themselves,” while a cameraman records everything they do. But something sinister awaits them when they arrive, and it may be by design of someone within the group.

If you want a better picture of what the film’s about, watch the trailer. I don’t really want to dig any further, because the mystery of what’s going on, what type of film is really being made, and who is making it, is the driving force that makes Anacoreta compelling.

And that’s really the main thing it has going for it: the mystery itself and the progression of unveiling of new details. That, and the assured performances of its cast. But the answers revealed in the end may or may not be as gratifying as the simple act of following along, wondering where things are going throughout the preceding 80 minutes. For me, the rising tensions and twists amounted to a, “Hah, clever.” Perhaps it’ll do more for you.

But I respect Anacoreta and director/star Jeremy Schuetze for attempting something different. Properly, Anacoreta never reaches for enough visceral scares to warrant the “horror” label. It’s more of a psychological thriller about betrayal, paranoia, and the obsessive pursuit of one’s art. And its twist-within-a-twist is pulled off in an entertaining way, even as it raises eyebrows about both the motivation to set certain events in motion and the logistical plausibility of doing so.

In a genre steeped in tired tropes and ham-fisted scares, one has to appreciate the use of the form to attempt something different entirely.