Based on director Nicolas McCarthy’s 11-minute short that was screened at Sundance 2011, his feature horror film The Pact had a lot going against it; it was made quickly, on a low budget, and its leading lady was known as “yer one from Bring It On: All Or Nothing.” Yikes.
But though The Pact is far from a perfect film, neither is it an outright failure. The surprisingly strong Caity Lotz plays the underwritten streetwise heroine Annie, who returns home for her mother’s funeral to find that her sister has vanished. Desperate to uncover the secrets of the house and find her sibling, her investigations force her to confront the ghosts, literal and figurative, of her past.
There are a few genuinely brilliant moments that demonstrate a real understanding of both traditional jump-scares and emotionally haunting subjects.
From the brilliant John Carpenter-like opening that uses sea-sickness inducing camera work to stalk an unsuspecting woman, the visuals are strong, and some of the underlying ideas even stronger. As silhouettes eerily move around the house and Caity has fractured flashbacks that leave echoes of a man’s violent sobs hanging in the air, the scares build, both aesthetically and atmospherically. And as the abusive history of the building begins to unfurl, a real sense of suspense is created as we wait for the literally horrific secrets of Caity’s home to reveal themselves.
Except they never do, really. Instead, McCarthy tries to shoehorn in yet another horror movie; one in which ghosts, séances, Ouija boards and the obligatory “horror heroine running around in her underwear” scene take priority. And as these spectres lead Caity down the dull garden-path of old photos, ghost-whisperers and the exorcising skills of Google (or “Global”) maps, the pace lags, clichés are embraced and theme becomes desperately muddled, and unintentionally funny. Transforming his short into a feature seems to have involved hurling everything but a haunted kitchen sink at the audience, and only a few things stick.
But for a feature debut, McCarthy does show promise, and if he can be confident enough to be original, his follow-up project should be worth a look.