As a woman struggles to come to grips with her past in the wake of her mother's death, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home.
The Pact is a low budget thriller that’s light on gore and stronger on tension in the old-school John Carpenter way, without adding much new of its own. It’s a promising, efficient debut for McCarthy, but any kind of originality isn’t part of the deal.
It works hard, and the first half hour is textbook creepy, but the oldschool grab-bag of shocks struggles to jolt a dour script to life.
There’s lots of flickering lights but it’s this chiller’s batteries that are on the wane.
Cue lots of flickering lightbulbs and Annie running around in a vest and short shorts (what is it about the presence of the supernatural that makes women want to lose most of their clothes?). Some goosebumps-inducing moments, though.
By the time Annie elicits the help of a local psychic to spell out what’s happening with a makeshift Ouija board, any deal The Pact has made with horror fans hoping for a tense movie-going experience has long since been broken.
There are some very neat little scary moments, but the whole thing fails to hang together and the plot is muddled.
This is by-the-numbers, low budget genre filmmaking, nodding in the direction of both The Silence Of The Lambs and The Exorcist as it trundles to its pre-ordained conclusion.
Lots of over-the-shoulder camera work adds to the tension, along with a creepy performance by Hayley Hudson as an anaemic (not a good look) psychic.
Cleverly exploits aspects of everyone's childhood.
A good idea fights unsuccessfully for its life.
General release. Check local listings for show times.