THE GRACEFIELD INCIDENT – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

Filmmaking is about manipulating the audience’s view on a story through pictures, and that’s why found footage has always been kind of weird. Found footage forces the perspective of the audience to lie in the POV of the main character, which means that they sometimes lack the ability to seem as intricately crafted as other films. They sometimes are lacking some of the manipulative ability. This gets especially compounded whenever the found footage gimmick does nothing to make the film genuinely scary, with the film both lacking the manipulative power to be scary but also the actively working against the more traditional filmmaking that would make the film scarier. The Gracefield Incident, unfortunately, seems to contrive its reason for being found footage but also tends to hide the horror that would make it genuinely scary.

The Gracefield Incident is about a group of friends who end up stuck in the forest, at the mercy of a monster. It’s your typical monster story, spiced up with some human drama, that tends to get more and more ridiculous as it goes on until it starts to rip off M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, a film that was initially overrated, but at least has the benefit of being directed to a tee by a Hitchcockian filmmaker.

That’s not something The Gracefield Incident has the luxury of because, again, it’s a found footage movie. There are moments of intensity and some harrowing compositions, but most of these come from the moments whenever the camera pulls back and stops actually being a found footage movie, allowing the angle of the camera to have an actual effect on the level of intensity present in the film. The script also not being spectacular, doesn’t help. If there’s one recent film series that The Gracefield Incident wants to be it’s Cloverfield and it’s even better sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane, and lacking the mastery that is behind the creative teams of those films, amounts to the film lacking the sense of polish that those have. The film doesn’t ever seem actively bad, it just lacks any sense of originality, even if it does contain some intensity.

When using found footage, you have to keep in mind that you’re losing some of the cinematic manipulation that you could have been gained from a more traditional shooting style. This paired with a script burdened by exposition and predictability seems to sink The Gracefield Incident even if there are some thrills to be found.

Momentum Pictures released THE GRACEFIELD INCIDENT in select theaters and on demand and digital HD on July 21, 2017.