Film #37 – The Pact

The Pact is one of those films that makes me sad to see the demise of the video store. It’s just not a film that you’d choose to watch unless you were a diehard fan of the genre or stumbled across it when looking for something else.

Which is not to say that it’s bad. It’s not. It’s just not good enough to rise to the level that demands you pay attention. I should know, I fell asleep for a good five minutes of it.

Revisiting her childhood home after her mother’s recent death, Nicole Barlowe (a cameo from soap star Agnes Bruckner) vanishes mid-Skype with her young daughter (whose presence in the film is often forgotten by the filmmaker). When her resentful sister Annie (Caity Lotz) and more responsible cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins) arrive on scene, it quickly become clear to Annie that something is amiss in the house – a point well made when an invisible force bounces off walls and ceilings. Narrowly escaping with Nicole’s daughter Eva (Dakote Bright) in tow, Annie realises that Liz has also vanished. While local cop Creek (Casper van Dien (I know!)) is sympathetic, he’s also suspicious forcing Annie to turn to local spooky girl Stevie (Haley Hudson) for answers. What Stevie discovers inside the house implies that something is trying to protect a secret from Annie’s past that her mother died to defend.

From this framework the film is competent but never brilliant, a shame given that the director is clearly passionate about the work. The scares are very artfully done (one or two of them come as real crowd shockers) but tend to follow the same cat-jumps-out –from-behind-the-door kind of shock a little too much. As Annie starts to unravel the clues, the film likes to have it both ways by introducing supernatural elements and quotidian scares in equal measure which sort of works but feels a bit like cheating. To its credit, The Pact does do some vaguely interesting things with the supernatural elements once the obnoxious Paranormal Activity body sliding is dispensed with (thankfully early on) particularly in the way it tries to incorporate modern technology into the mix. It’s just not consistently clever across the field.

In terms of performance, everyone does a basically good job but no one really stands out from the field. This is arguably not the actors’ fault though, there’s just not enough nuance in the script for them to have anything to flesh out. We get surface indicators that at least Nicole (if not Annie) have been drug abusers in the past owing to a supposedly traumatic upbringing but we never get a sense of what that means or what role their mental state plays into the events unfolding around them (though Lotz does a suitable amount of harumphing just after the act 1 turning point).

That’s a real problem for this film; you never get a sense that The Pact is about anything more than a series of events happening one after the other. And horror is a genre that bears the burden of that responsibility more than many others as it is horror’s job to show us what we fear as a society. Because this film in particular tries to have it both ways with its scares it just never gets concentrated enough to mean much.

The other hallmark of horror of course is pacing and, in this regard, The Pact does quite well. Many of the films I’ve seen this year have suffered from poor pacing in the first act, but if The Pact lags at all, it’s not until the mid point of the film by which stage I’ve already made the commitment to see this through to the end.

So, basically, The Pact is a perfectly serviceable horror film for fans of the genre and for people who like really trawling the depths of their Netflix list.

Once again, this was part of the Toronto After Dark Summer Sessions and I think the crowd there would agree that The Pact  is perfectly fine, but it’s no Juan of the Dead.