SLIFF 2015 Review – THE NAMELESS

THE NAMELESS screens Saturday November 7th at 10pm at The Tivoli Theater as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival. Ticket information can be found HERE

Review by Stephen Jones

There were quite a few other movies I wished I was watching instead of THE NAMELESS at various points during its runtime. The one that came to mind most was Ti West’s “House of the Devil.” That and other movies like it built tension with the sort of minimalist horror that “The Nameless” would have been much better off working with. It’s one of a few different ways the filmmakers could have gone with the movie that would have been a lot more effective than what they ended up with.

The initial premise is based around the real-life event that inspired “The Exorcist.” It apparently was even shot in the real house. That alone could make for a thoroughly interesting story, except nothing is done with it. It simply starts with an exorcism scene generic to the point of Clip-Art, and follows with a story just as rote. Old family house, one person wants to keep it and fix it up, the other wants to sell it, et cetera. It chooses to be “based on” an event that inspired one of the greatest horror films of all time, and instead feels like a retread of half a dozen sub-”Insidious” movies from the past few years.

The characters are what they are. Nobody is outright unlikeable, which for some reason is a really easy pitfall for horror characters, but nobody really inspired me to get behind them, either. The female lead is close to being a solid enough character, mostly by virtue of actress Amy Holland trying hard to make it work, but I got nothing from the other characters or their stories. The closest thing I came to feeling anything was a bit about cops getting shot (she sees it on the news waiting for her cop boyfriend to come home), which went nowhere, added nothing to the story, and wasn’t brought up again, and just made me cringe.

Okay there was one other thing that got a reaction out of me, but it’s a lot more of a nitpick than I usually bother with. This movie shows the Arch more than I see it in a week. I looked up the director David Trotti to see if he was a local and just REALLY proud of shooting in his hometown, but found nothing about where he was from. But nothing shows that this was made by locals at all. But they use a shot of the Arch for the opening montage after the credits (okay), establishing shots before scenes that don’t take place anywhere near downtown (weird…), establishing shots before establishing shots (really?), in every backdrop for the bad fake news (all low budget movies with fake news have bad fake news, no points against it here), in the logo for a fake realty company, it really does stand out this much how weirdly often they show the Arch.

It’s also weird how that’s the ONLY thing that stands out in the movie. In the end, that’s what really bothered me here. It’s not even bad enough to stand out. It offered a premise that had me genuinely interested, but only gave the same bland horror I’ve seen done better elsewhere, and tops it off with a non-ending. Nothing suggests that anybody involved had any interest or passion about the original, real-life exorcism (the whole hook of the movie, mind you), just that they had access to the original house it happened in. I really, really wished they’d done something with it. Instead they did nothing.