Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Jason Miller
A struggling married couple who have been evicted from their home makes a fateful decision to sleep the night in their car on a wooded road. At times thrilling, and at other times head-scratching, this film has a great heart but a flawed mind. Convincing performances by Tedra Milan and Michael Reagan make this worth watching.
Hard times. Jen (Tedra Milan), a freelance photographer, has been struggling to pay the bills, dodging debt collectors for months until everything comes crashing down around her. Her husband, Tyler (Michael Reagan), is an aspiring novelist struggling with self-confidence and minimal results. Subsequently evicted from their home, they are also running low on gas, and out of money find themselves having to camp in their car on the side of a rural road. This couple is in trouble. As the evening progresses, it’s going to get worse.
Jen is distraught with their situation, and Tyler works hard to convince her that things will improve. Unbeknownst to her, Tyler has spent some of their precious remaining dollars on a bottle of booze. Here is a suggestion: never give a depressed struggling writer whiskey! Tyler impairs his judgment at the worst possible moment. Because, as the couple struggles to rest, mysterious strangers pay them a visit in the night.
It starts rather benignly, with a homeless man leaving them an ominous warning. Later visitors amplify the situation when someone attaches a parking boot to one of the wheels. And then masked strangers arrive, with actual malice in mind. As the tension ramps up in the car, the flashbacks further the marital difficulties of the mercurial Tyler and the frustrated Jen. They have sadly earned their plight. Their artistic pride has prevented them from understanding how to survive in a world where you need to pay bills. And now, strange masked men with weapons may prove to be their doom.
Breaking this movie into its constituent parts, the first act was a bit of a repetitive slog. The exposition bogs down the progression of the narrative. It just takes a while to get going. The second act is full of critical reveals and the active threat in play is a tension-filled home invasion, where the home is compressed to the size of a Buick. In a lot of ways, it is reminiscent of The Strangers. This was where the movie started to soar. But like Icarus, it got a little too ambitious.
The third act continues to build tension, but it attempts a twist that leaves far too many loose threads and becomes a real stretch of a conclusion. Going into the third act, I found myself curious as to how they were going to explain the intruders, and when the reveal happens, I couldn’t help but think there would have been a better way to stitch it together. There were a few too many players to make the plot sensible, in the end.
That said, the performances by Milan and Regan work well together. They were a completely believable couple. You understood their situation. It has a very plausible foundation, built upon a shaky relationship and battered by bad decisions, and pride. Unfortunately, the ending mucks things up a bit, consequently lessening the impact. Also, the whole theme is a bit of a bummer, seeing this struggling couple cope with their failures. As always, your mileage may vary. You might love the denouement. Still, a recommended film, but it falls just short of being something special.
Ghosts of the Void was a featured film in Popcorn Frights Film Festival 2023 virtual program. The film like many indie features is not rated, and there is no wide release date yet set for this film. It would likely be rated R for violence and mature situations.