“No, I can’t stand it!” A year ago, news came from the Sunday festival saying that some spectators had fled from the room where they projected ‘witnessed’ to the shout of “I Cannot Take This Stress”. In a horror movie this is always suspicious: Hype in view. But, of course, if the film is signed by a director like Steven Soderbergh and a screenwriter as related to the genre as David Koepp (‘The last step’, ‘The secret window’), and is also chosen to inaugurate the Sitges festival, one thinks that, he hears, why not: maybe we are facing one of the horror films of the year.
Well no. It is true that ‘witness’ part of a quite suggestive formal and narrative premise: a story of the enchanted house shot entirely in the first person and from the point of view of the spectrum. Through the use of the subjective chamber -in Steadicam mode, not the shoulder -Soderbergh tells the day to day of a ghost after the arrival of a family ”of a family. The particular sensitivity of the teenage daughter, traumatized by a lucrative event, is the dramatic resource that is used in the script to advance the action.
The staging and work of Soderbergh’s camera (he carries it himself, the director “makes” ghost) is impeccable. The film is articulated through a sequence sequence succession cut to black. Depending on the time between cutting and cutting this will be the duration of the ellipsis. The assembly is minimal. The action of each scene takes place in real time, facilitating the immersion of the viewer and emphasizing the prominence of the “presence.”
So far everything great. The ‘witness’ problem is his dramaturgy. Neither the characters, quite flat and superficial, nor the plot, conventional and very predictable, are at the height of their formal device. Remember a little to the case of the recent ‘of violent nature’: the narrative form is very original, a surprising Slow-Slasher, but that does not mean that it works from a dramatic, terrifying point of view.
From that perspective, ‘Imaster’ seems more like a gymnastic exercise than artistic. An exhibition of strength of the staging with little satisfactory results. Conceptually, it is an experiment worthy of applause. Narrate the same as always in another way, to give it “another twist” – since we talk about ghosts – it is always appreciated. But this time it does not end as it should, not even as a supernatural drama to ‘a Ghost Story’ (2017). What if the Solandance viewers fled for another reason …?
