Thinking and rambling on about Coherence (2013)

Coherence (2013), is this a sci-fi mumblecore masterpiece? Probably.
It definitely was for the first 40 minutes of its run time, it had me  g l u e d  to the screen grinding my brain trying to keep up with the mechanics of it all.
Then, a couple of  d e t o u r s  (mainly one), mixed in with a bit of perplexity surrounding the statistical plausibility of what I was seeing, killed my immersion and the beautiful momentum of story a little bit... 

But either way, it was a great watch, one that I didn’t comprehend 100% tho, which is why I decided to write a  way too long and rumbly  run-through of the events.

In order to avoid being very verbose and/or very confusing while differentiating between various versions of each character, I decided to use ✨ colours ✨.
I selected blue to mark the OG characters (cause blue glowsticks), and then every other provenience has its own tint.   

 I’d say, let’s start off by listing the characters:

Emily: although the movie is quite coral, i'd say she’s probably the protagonist.
She used to be on a trajectory to become a very successful dancer but, oh my god, get this:
stardom-shaped Emily created a whole dance show and was supposed to be the prima-ballerina in it BUT, right before the premiere they switched her with ‘’Svetlana’’, and offered her an understudy job instead. She didn’t take it out of pride and was hence booted from the company (career lost).
BUT THEN, Svetlana pulled out, and the company gave the main role to the dancer who DID accept the understudy job, and that woman became the most famous dancer in the country………         
so basically………… it’s like Emily lost her career twice….

… Girl.. I have to take my hat off to your steely will to live, cause I literally have no idea how you’re still with us after something like that, if it’d had happened to me I would’ve jumped off a balcony.

Kevin: her boyfriend who wants to move to Vietnam for a few months. He used to date 

→  Laurie: she brings the mess and the drama to the evening, she is now dating Kevin’s friend

→ →  Amir: he’s there, and apparently he has a thing for dating kevin's exes

Lee: the host of the party, she is nerdy and successful and married to 

→ Mike: he used to be an actor but alcool related issues caused him to abandon the scenes.
He’s pretty charismatic and  a l s o  quite messy, as demonstrated by him nonchalantly throwing digs at Laurie and Amir during the quaint dinner.

Beth:  new-age-spiritualist type person who, after hearing that Laurie was also joining the dinner party, thought Emily could use her vial of herbs with a whisper of ketamine to get to through the evening. She’s married to Hugh but cheated on him with Mike.

Hugh: Beth's husband

 

So, what is happening?
Basically, due to a comet passing very close to Earth, a series of reality bending phenomena unfold.   

The house where the friends are dining becomes isolated from the real world and is, instead, surrounded by a “portal” which connects it to alternate realities. These dimentions are inhabited by different versions of our characters (colloquially called "Others"), who now have the ability to cross into the OG’s reality, and viceversa.

Let’s talk some specifics:

1) the portal takes the form of a “black fog”, and it’s a one-way gate: every time someone walks into it, they are taken to another, random, reality.
That means that if a OG character crosses it they are a goner, as there are so many accessible dimensions, that the chances of them ever managing to get back to their original one, are virtually zero.

Where exactly is the fog situated? I’m not 100% sure. You necessarily cross it if you go so far out that you reach a twin house, but do you traverse it by going to one of the cars? I’d say no.

2) the characters cannot contact the outside in anyway: the internet is down, their cell phones don’t have signal and the house has no landline (and even if it did, i doubt that it would work).

The existence of multiple versions of each character leads to a pretty obvious conundrum: how can one tell if someone (or something), is original or "other"? 

There are a few thing that can be taken into account:

1) When the characters go outside they use glowsticks to see in the dark, and in the house there are 3 colours they could potentially choose from (red, blue and green).
The type of glowstick they carry can be used to tell whether a character comes from the house or not, as in this reality one they only open the blue box.

2) During the evening some small, strange events occurr: for example, phone screens spontaneously cracking.
In the OG reality it happens to Emily, right before she gets to the house, and later on to Hugh while they are having dinner. But in other realities, these characters have completely unscathed phones. 

There are also all sorts of other minor differences that can be spotted, like the type of band-aid Hugh wears on his brow (or if he wears one at all) after he gets injured.

3) Does the memory of the inhabitants match the contents of the box?
This requires some explanation: in order to distinguish their house, both the OGs and some of the Others put together a box that contains a random object (of example, a coaster), and photographs of each individual with a number written on the back. If a character correctly recalls them both, it’s safe to say they are in the right place.

4) It’s also worth noting that a character and their others can be slightly different in personality, attitude and/or life choices, which could be a telling sign of their provenance.
For example, Emily is pretty indecisive and isn’t too stoked on moving to Vietnam with her boyfriend, while we see other Emilies that absolutely are.
Kevin and Laurie aren’t completely over each other in this reality, while some Kevins appear to be all about Emily, period. 
Hugh is very gentle and polite, while other Hughs have strange anger outbursts.

 

So, the first thing I did to make sense of the events, was tracking the OGs’ movements and actions during the evening:

14 minutes in there is (what looks like) a power outage in the neighbourhood, so everyone goes outside to check on the situation. They only walk for a few meters and come back, so I don’t think they “crossed over”.        
When they re-enter, a glass on the table is broken. During the blackout there was no sound of glass breaking, so it must’ve happened while they were outside… I wonder how.

Did they actually cross over into another reality? One with a similarly empty house, but a broken glass? But, surely, they would’ve said something about the weird fog before walking into it...
Yeah, I think I’ll stick with my original idea, maybe the glass breaking is just an effect of the comet: it has been shown to crack phone screens, so it’s definitely possible. 

Hugh is very adamant about contacting his brother, who is an astrophysicist (?) and, in order to do that, he wants to reach the one house two blocks away that appears to still have power.
Apparently, his brother asked him to call him if anything weird happened while the comet passed by. He also told him that they should stay inside, but Hugh reckons making that phone call is more important.
He is trying to project a very calm aura, but you can tell he’s concerned about the situation…
I wonder if his brother insinuated that something   v e r y   bad could happen.

So: Hugh takes Amir and leaves… and this is the last we’ll see of them.

20 minutes in someone knocks on the door. This is most likely a Hugh wondering around trying to make his phone call.

Considering how incredibly loudly he banged that door, the “sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you” note he  goes around sticking on doors later is absolutely warranted.

A few minutes later Hugh and Amir come back, and they have a box with them. Hugh also appears to have been hit in the head by something.
His demeanor is a tad bit different, he seems more pissy than usual and a bit distant with Beth… it could just be the situation, but I reckon this is an indication that it’s not the same person.

I think it’s worth noting that it’s a Hugh&Amir pair that returns to the house, like, technically it could’ve been just a Hugh, a Hugh&Kevin pair or, well, any other combination of guests.
But I guess it makes sense since no one but Hugh has a compelling reason to leave the house at this time and, apparently, in most realities Amir is indeed the expendable one who is made to tag along (I mean Mike doesn’t have a single picture of him in his house, does he… that’s a telling sign).

All of this considered, i think this first exchange illustrates a characteristic of these realities: they don't seem to be very different from eachother.

The character's personalities can vary a bit, and their relationships can be more or less successful (for example, Emily and Kevin appear to be different levels of “in love” based on the dimension they are in), but every character has a similar baseline. They’re all doing mostly the same things.  

That concept is quite exemplified by Mike’s crazily tone-death line “if there are a million different realities, I have slept with your wife in every one of them” and now, I’m not sure that that is necessarily true (more on that later)…. but still, the idea is there.
Another prime example is the fact that multiple Hughs wrote the same exact message and went around hanging them on doors, like… clearly there is a shared common ground.

I guess we live in a pretty deterministic universe.

 

So, what’s up with the box the pair brought in?

According to Amir, when they arrived at the house, Hugh walked around the side to take a peek, while he decided to hung out front.
Moments later he heard a sound and, when investigating it, he saw his mate putting the box down. Amir, hence, picked it up and walked away with it. But now, Hugh denies ever touching it.                                                                             
Based on the informations future “Hughs” give us: Hugh like passed out/fell on the ground due to the shock of seeing the others (hence the injury), and it was actually the local Hugh who Amir saw dropping the box outside…  

CONTENTS OF THE BOX: a ping-pong paddle and pictures with numbers (written in red):

Hugh: 1   -   Amir: 5   -   Lee: 1   -   Laurie: 2    -   Emily: 4    -   Beth: 4    -   Mike: 1    -   Kevin: 6 

Can I just say....
The people in that reality had already put together a box? Like, they had already figured out what was happening and what they needed to do to identify themselves?
Seems to me that the times are not perfectly aligned, cause, otherwise that is genuinely impressive…
or, maybe, in that reality Hugh’s brother gave him a substantial briefing before the evening happened.

32 minutes in Laurie, Kevin, Emily and Mike leave to check out the twin house.
When they come back they mention seeing the black fog, but while Hugh and Amir instantly comment “oh yeah, we crossed that earlier” the group doesn’t confirm or deny doing it.
I initially took that as implying that they hadn’t, especially cause they’ll soon get into a conversation regarding the glowsticks, and during that we're clearly able to see that the blue box is the only one opened, so… “it’s the house” I figured.
I also thought “well, what is the chance of them crashing into a random house that was missing exactly the four of them?”.        

BUT 45 minutes in Emily overhears Beth and Lee having a conversation that is pretty much identical to something she had heard them saying at the very beginning of the evening.

AND Lee is washing the green glass that broke during the blackout, and it’s now perfectly intact…

so  ✨shocker✨ this is   n o t   the house, it’s another house that just so happens to share the same colour of opened glowsticks, plus Laurie, Kevin, Emily and Mike all going out as a group… What is the likelihood of that?
And that's not the end of it cause there is another  h u g e  similarity: through their conversations we gather that this Hugh and Amir  a l s o  left the house together to make the phonecall... AND THEY CAME BACK WITH A BOX IN THIS REALITY TOO.

This originally sent me, I could accept for there to be some consistencies, like, maybe Lee and Beth are just categorically not interested in leaving the house, and a number of Hughs and Amirs have been turned off by their first escapade so, more often than not, it’s the remaining group who goes out exploring the second time…
but the fact that there are a number of different realities where a box was put outside that early? And, also, where an Amir was there to witness it and steal it?
That seemed very unlikely to me…. So I tried  c a l c u l a t i n g  the odds to the best of my abilities 
-> results later                                                    

 

About 30 minutes in is  a l s o  when the characters begin to understand the logistics of what’s happening, as Hugh recalls having one of his astophysicist brother’s books in the car and, when he goes to get it, it turns out to be exactly what they needed to read.
I’ll copy and paste the important part:

There's a cat in a box... that has, like, a 50/50 chance of living... because there's a vial of poison that's also in the box.

So, regular physics would say that it's one or the other. That the cat is either alive or dead.

But Brian would argue that quantum physics says that both realities exist simultaneously. It's only when you open the box that they collapse into a single event.

Right?

So, listen to this. This is what he's written.

"There is another theory: that two states continue to exist separate and decoherent from each other, each creating a new branch of reality based on the two outcomes.
Quantum decoherence ensures that the different outcomes have no interaction with each other."

So, there are two separate realities, presumably until the comet passes.

If decoherence is maintained, those two separate realities will remain separate once the comet passes. Everybody will be fine. Decoherence keeps us separate.

What if we've already interacted with ourselves? We're collapsing on ourselves right now.

As far as I can tell the movie seems to suggest that this split-realities situation is fully caused by the comet. Up until this evening, only a single reality existed: but now with every choice the characters are presented with, a new branch appears.

Now, I am not completely sold on this idea.. I think to me it makes more sense that branching is a thing that reality has been doing since its inception, and the comet simply caused all of the paths to connect temporarily, by upholding the quantum decoherence…

Otherwise.. what on earth will happen when the comet is gone?
I feel like the only option would be for the paths to collapse onto each other, and reconstitute a single reality, cause space-time can’t suddenly manage to handle branches, when they were never an integral part of its structure…
but at the end of the movie i don't think there is any collapsing, it seems to me that decoherence is simply reinstated.

ALSO, if the branching started during the evening, then how come there are some houses with electricity from the get go?      
The fact that as soon as they walk out, they can see a house in the distance with the lights on, indicates to me that those Marks and Beths had the generator up and running going into the evening… like I don’t think they would’ve managed to rush to it that fast, they probably made the choice to turn it on during the day….

Although I GUESS it’s possible the choice was made before the guests arrived, but while the comet was already in action.

Or maybe, it’s not just space that’s acting weird, but time too… maybe the realities are not all synched.

BUT ALSO, the character of Emily really makes me wonder… how is it possible that the Emilies that got to the dinner were all identical, but made such different choices when it comes to Vietnam: we have Emily who really isn’t keen on going, while another Em is all happy sitting on Kevin’s lap, talking about the journey ahead… 

Moving on with the plot, during the conversation regarding the glowsticks, Hugh and Amir realise that this is not their original reality (as they are carrying red ones), so they sneak out and take the box they stole with them.

In the meantime, Mike leaves the house to blackmail himself (terrible idea).

A few minutes later he returns wearing a blue glowstick around his neck BUT he claims to have been gone for a whole 45 minutes, when in reality it was 10 tops, and also he acts very strangely (probably drunk)…. 
Sooo this is another blue Mike, but no longer the OG Mike… we’ll call him Mike. 

As all of this is going down, Lee and Beth are in the kitchen, and the former is expressing how tired she is of Mike’s drinking problem: he is no longer the man she married...
That's another thing that made me wonder, cause Mike and Lee seemed to be doing alright, Lee looked genuinely enamoured with him, and he claimed to “love his fucking life”… to me, that sounded like his drinking problem was a thing of the past, or at least under control.

But for Mike and Lee it appears to be still an ongoing or unresolved thing.

I think this supports the idea that the branching didn’t start with the comet, it has been going on for, well, ever. Some versions of Mike had sorted out their issues with alcool by the time they got to this evening, some hadn’t.

BUT ALSO, maybe Lee is using particularly harsh words cause she’s triggered by seeing Mike drinking again… she thought it was dead in the past, and seeing him falling back into it put her on edge…  w h o   k n o w s  

 

55 minutes in they hear a car window being smashed, and the victim turns out to be Hugh’s car. 
The group is baffled, as they cannot comprehend the reason for this action: the book was visibly not in the backseat anymore and nothing else was taken so, what was the point of that?

Later on, Emily can be seen smashing a car window to isolate another Emily and kill her... I wonder if that’s what was happening here too?
But this time around, when Emily goes out to her car, it’s a Kevin who menacingly appears… 
Are there, indeed, a number of Ems going around trying kill each other, but in this instance the murderous lady failed, cause she was interrupted by a stray Kevin? Or did Kevin smash the car window himself?
What was he trying to achieve in that case?

 

1 hour in  and a Hugh and Amir pair, dualwielding red and blue glowsticks, comes shuffling in with a copy of the book.
They claim to have spent some time at another house, where the locals medicated Hugh's injury and gifted them some red glowsticks, on top of the blue ones they had left with. 

Emily, Mike, Kevin, Laurie, Lee and Beth decide that they originated from this house, and welcome them back…. I mean, what else can you do.

Also, wait……. Remember how Hughs are going around hanging "sorry for spooking you" notes? And the house had 2? Well this house (I’ll call it the rainbow house) has 2 notes also...  

yes, i made a table

So... house and the rainbow house have experienced completely identical events, except for: the glass breaking, and Lee and Beth having the conversation about the vase at the beginning of the evening …

They both retrieved the book from the car, they both got a box from another house, they both made and received a note, they both had Hugh and Amir leaving first, Lee and Beth always staying inside, and the remaining four characters leaving second…..

That sounds like a lot, but not necessarily impossible. 

Well, now that the characters have figured out that traversing the fog leads you to a different dimension, they I’ve also realised the significance of the strange box: with its random contents, it's a way to identify your house between the myriads out there... so they get to making their own. 
They select a coaster as the "special" object to put inside, and they start rolling the dice to assign everyone a number. 
And this…. Is when Emily cracks the motherfucking code..
remember how the rainbow house brought in a stolen box, earlier? Well, on a piece of paper she sees the numbers that were contained in that box, and they are completely different from the ones she remembers... aka, the ones from the house.

(for comparison 

Hugh: 5    -   Amir: 4    -    Lee: 5   -   Laurie: 5   -   Emily: 3   -   Beth: 3    -   Mike: 2    -   Kevin: 2 
(the rainbow house uses a green marker)

Hugh: 1    -   Amir: 5   -   Lee: 1   -   Laurie: 2    -   Emily: 4    -   Beth: 4    -   Mike: 1    -   Kevin: 6
(the house used a red marker) )

She sneakily starts asking everyone "hey bestie, so do you remember what number was behind your picture in the box we stole?" and the only people who can recall the "correct" ones, aka the only people who come from the rainbow house originally, are Lee and Beth.

Furthermore, when asked about which item they remember being contained in that box, Hugh&Amir recall a stapler, Lee&Beth an oven mitt, Emily, Kevin, Laurie a ping-pong paddle and Mike a napkin, which really spells out how varied their origins are. 

By the way, it's worth noting that Hugh, Amir and Mike   a l s o  come from houses where they brought in a random box, as none of them goes "idk what you're talking about, the items in what stolen box?". 

A little summary of all the movements up until the end of the evening

Having learned about the situation, Emily wants to go back to her dimension but…… how tho?

Like, the only way she’d manage to identify the house is if they’ve still got the stolen box there (because, for example, the rainbow house has lost theirs), and if they let her access it.. not to mention, what if there is another Emily there now? You’d have to kindly convince her to leave.

 

1 hour and ~14 minutes in, after Mike gets attacked by another Mike who barges in through the door, Emily decides to take her chances and traverses the fog.
After visiting a number of realities, she finally settles on a house where everyone is merrily having a conversation on the sofa, seemingly completely unaware of what’s going on outside.

Are they actually unaware? Maybe they never lost power, as they had the generator up and running going into the evening, so…. they just, never even looked outside.

Emily decides that she needs to get rid of the local Emily, so she lures her away from the others by breaking the car window (as mentioned before) and, after seemingly killing her, she takes are place.

We have finally reached the ending of the movie, and it's quite interesting.

It's now morning time, the comet has passed, and Emily is having a conversation with the local Kevin, when his phone rings: it’s the local Emily who, unbeknownst to Em, in still around after surviving the  b r u t a l  attack.
That’s awkward.

So... when it comes to the  c o s m i c  scale, there are a couple of options to explain what has happened:

1-  The decoherence was re-instated: all the different realities survived and reverted back to their natural state of isolation (btw can you imagine going back to "normal" after an evening like that, knowing that the man next to you is not your actual husband, but an alternate version of him? Like, what do you even do?).

Or 

2- the comet leaving caused all the realities that interacted to collapse onto eachother, and this one survived because… no one local was aware of the interaction? Only Emily? 
That doesn't really make much sense to me tho, i think the interraction is more of a binary concept, like there either is or there isn't. 

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“If I recall correctly, you said you had made some calculations” you might be thinking. Well, to be specific I   t r i e d   to make some calculations, but quickly realised they were beyond my mathematical capabilities, so I outsourced to an online  s i t e.
I’m not sure the results are any good, cause being mathematically challenged also makes it impossible for me to judge the work of others, but still... I’m gonna put them out there, and you can decide for yourself.  

So: my objective was trying to calculate how many realities would share the same amount of similarities as the house and the rainbow house do, to see if the unfolding of events is completely insane or not.

I started off by embracing the idea that the branching of realities actually started during the evening, which is what appears to be canon in the movie.

Once I reconciled with that fact, the first thing I did was trying to count how many “diverging” moments occurred during the movie, and how many branchings each could’ve created. Every single time someone had to make a choice during the evening, or any time something peculiar happened, I tried to quantify the possible outcome options (for example: glass breaks/glass doesn’t break, they open the blue box/red box/green box/none  etc).

I tallied up, more or less, 121 possible events, of which (since many outcomes are mutually exclusive) a total of 59 that can happen in each reality. Again “more or less”, as I only counted as “diverging moments” the most blant ones, like “do we leave the house to call the brother or not?” or “do you want this or that bandaid?” but technically there could be a shit tone of micro-moments that impacted the unfolding of events as well.  

 

At this point I asked, yes, ChatGPT to calculate the number of all possible combinations of these 121 events in groups of 59, considering they are organised in exclusivity groups (aka if this happens, than this other event doesn’t), which are mostly pairs.

The result was: 1.729 · 10¹⁸ .

That’s a lot of realities.

 

I then asked it to calculate how many realities share, for example, the first 5 events, and the answer was “about ~1.56%”.
 Hence the chance of the characters happening into two realities with those commonalities is pretty low.

 

But then it occurred to me: there are some events that heavily impact what happens later on. 
For example, whether Emily agrees to go to Vietnam or not in the beginning, has an influence on Kevin’s demeanor with Laurie. 

Does that impact the probabilities in any way?

Let’s say that 3 early events directly determine the outcomes of 3 interactions later on: what are the chances looking like then?

Apparently 12,5% .

And the more influential events there are, the more the percentage climbs: with 4, it’s at 25% . 

 

So, not that low at all. Quite believable, actually   (I f   c o r r e c t).

B u t  t h e n  I  t h o u g h t , who's to say that every reality is different... cause I've been assuming that... yeah, every plane of existence is at least slightly different from the others, cause it was originated by a diverging "branch"...
but what if there are literally infinite realities, with  m a n y  of them being literally identical. 

And that's when my brain exploded, so... perfect movie. 

                            

The Blackwell Ghost 4

The Blackwell Ghost 4 is here, and this  ->  

was my expression going in, cause I remembered absolutely nothing...

Which was, in a way, exciting! 

Almost like watching a new sequel.

 

Firstly some merry news: homeboy is having a kid, and he looks elated.

 

that's his face while building the crib

He’s equally elated about Greg gifting him a painting from the Blackwell House, before finalising the sell. Apparently, he keeps staring deep into the art piece, hoping that it will:

“bring back a feeling that I can’t describe 

…. I hope I get it back”

this is unironically a 1:1 recreation 

I’m not sure what he’s referring to during this speech, is he talking about the feeling of kinship he (somehow) developed with Miss Blackwell? Has this new investigation failed to recreate that spark? 

Is he into gilfs? 

so.... clearly, the m o o d  issues homeboy was displaying during the last instalment haven't been getting better...  

What is actually going on with him tho: was it the stress caused by the impending life change of fatherhood all along? Was it the skepticism that met his documentaries? 

Talking of the devil, apparently people have been leaving insinuating comments on homeboy’s social media pages, noting a lack of information online regarding the Lightfoot murders, which causes him to go on a little (but much needed) tangent, on the sheer amount of cold cases that exist out there with absolutely no internet trail: that is a perfectly viable explanation, let’s move on.

It's finally time to delve back into the documenting and, looking for new material to fuel his investigation, homeboy has become buddies with a member of the local police force: the unforgettable Officer Ramey, who’s going to be with us for episodes and episodes to come.

This is very much a Jessica Fletcher/Sheriff Tupper dynamic, a “professional found dead in a ditch while amateur investigator finds the zodiac killer” situation.

Thanks to O. Ramey, homeboy gets ahold of the confession letter left by the killer, before committing suicide. 

“what authorities initially assumed to be a crossword puzzle” 

….  Authorities, please, it's clearly a cypher (very zodiac adjecent too).

After a questionable start, the authorities went on to give up and toss the note into an evidence box, cause who even cares about finding Susan anyway.   

C r i m i n a l l y, this puzzle has remained unsolved for the past 40 years... can you believe it.  

But now, there is a new Jessica in town: it’s time for homeboy to step in and crack the code  ask the internet to crack the code.

I mean that’s his super power, isn’t it. His incredible reach as a successful documentarian.

Okay but, I wish I was there on Facebook in 2019 to take part in the code cracking, so much fun.

 

While the community's chewing on the puzzle, homeboy’s starting his second trip to Florida. 

During the ride through the woods that preceed the Lightfoot house, he ponders on where the missing bodies could be, stating that:

"maybe, considering that those three bodies that they did find where in such a close proximity to the house, realistically I might be driving past somebody’s remains right now.

I take Lightfoot is kind of a lazy person, so I don’t think that he’d go too far out of his way to get rid of these bodies."

To which I say…… yeah those bodies where quite close to the house, but also: one was hanging from an overpass and another was tied to a buoy light in the lake (is that a lake?), so… I don’t think this guy is necessarily going to be lazy with his body disposal…

Like, I personally don’t think it’d be too far-fetched, to pose that he transported 10 bodies to an island deep inside a lake, for example, just throwing ideas out there.

Homeboy's current goal is to better the communication with the ghosts, and what's going to help with that, is the Ghost Whisperer Machine ᵀᴹ , aka the children’s toy he pimped-up.

I absolutely did not remember the logistics behind the contraption, apparently the buttons are activated not through pressure, but with temperature changes: taking advantage of the fact that ghosts, allegedly, induce a drastic lowering in T° around them.

On top of that, he's also setting up a bunch of new equipment: motion sensors, radios, windchimes...

This investigation is starting to look a bit expensive... how expensive you ask? 

Well, homeboy has actually dried up the shared savings account that held his and Terry’s vacation money… 7.000 dollars…   o o o o f

I’m sure that’s going to go down well with his unknowing, pregnant wife.   

The ghosts must've really missed their buddy, cause the activity starts really soon and they are very  aggressive and intense about it.  

The banging in the corridor is particularly incessant and, in a shocking twist, during the first night we actually get to see one of the ghosts for the first time. 

Really good sequence this one.

Since a ghostly appearance has finally been caught on camera, homeboy can reveal that he’s actually seen shady figures around the house before, but never mentioned them cause it would've been a baseless claim. 

Interestingly, glass is always involved when these spirits appear: could it be, that ghosts can be seen thanks to the refraction of transparent materials? 

Yes, yes it could.   

Needing a little breether from the house's atmosphere, the next day homeboy and pays a visit to the local cemetery, where he finds the graves of victims we've discussed so far and James Lightfoot’s, shoved at the far edge of the plot cause no one wants to be next to him.

When he comes back... he finds a shocking scene.

Front door: wide open 

Power: out  

Table: flipped

and, as the one camera that survived the power outage reveals: during the activity spike, a ghost’s finally tested the Ghost Whisperer Machine ᵀᴹ  .

Btw I love the detail of the wind chime moving cause the ghost is, theoretically, standing right underneath it.

 

Those are definitely letters

Since the message doesn’t make any sense, homeboy makes up his mind that the instrument must be faulty, which upsets him because:

“I built this thing to highlight my intelligence… It just makes me look like a fucking idiot” 

(no it doesn't don't you  e v e r  think that)

 

but is this   a c t u a l l y  a glitch tho? We’ll come back to that.

Soon, the banging (you guessed it) in the corridor returns at full force, causing homeboy to lose his temper and yell “WHAT IS THAT?”

I don’t know man, maybe go and check it out? You literally still haven’t investigated it. 

At this rate the ghost’s gonna get calluses on its hands with all that slamming… or on its forehead, cause that’s probably what’s hitting the wall at this point.

This movie is going by quite fast: we are already at the final night, and this one had me  g a g g e d , me and homeboy both ended up sleeping in the car.

And while the sun rising may give the illusion that worst is over… bestie… the real horror is about to come. 

Cause homeboy: calls Terry.  

He asks her to hop on a plane and join him in Florida, cause he’s too scared to be alone *.

To which she answers, by reminding him that the next day is her sister’s wedding…… 

which he  f o r g o t . 

And she is  a l s o  aware that he secretly spent all their vacation savings on his documentary gear.

A n d   she   a l s o  mentions how she's about to go into labor at any moment, and he's hours away. 

The phone call ends with Terry yelling “you are a terrible husband” and hanging up.

Well: this is a big wake up call for homeboy, who decides to cut the trip short and go home to his wife, who is 

“apparently gonna go into labor any day now”

who could've predicted that *. 

He isn’t in that much in a rush tho, so he still stays till night time, managing to capture a picture of a ghost reflected in a window. 

is that Susan or Sarah do you recon?

* (Did he low key forget that his wife was pregnant? Cause: is it a good idea to take a pregnant woman to a haunted house that's gonna scare her to death? Also, he tried to lure her in by telling her that she could go all out on the drinks, while sitting in the plane's first class too.... bro)

After the phonecall, he also expresses to the camera how disheartened he is by this latest Lightfoot escapade. 

He headed to Florida hoping that this time, the ghosts would finally tell him what it is that they want from him, but once again nothing was clearly communicated, causing him to wonder if he even has a role in the house at all.

By the way, I love how he drops tactical pauses all through this speech, basically going “well if you want to prove me wrong, ghosts, this would be the perfect time to do it! OPENLY COMMUNICATE!”.

 

... So, after just a couple of days, homeboy is leaving... 

But it’s not over, is it?

 

While editing the current documentary, homeboy decides to also look through the footage from the last investigation… and what does he find?

 

The Ghost Whisperer Machine ᵀᴹ  was not glitching. The ghosts have been trying to communicate this letter sequence since his last trip.

Why?

Cause it’s the key to solve the puzzle in Lightfoot’s suicide note….  S h i t.

Does this mean that the ghosts were looking at the killer as he was working on the encryption, and they memorised the code to break it? That’s kinda neat.

Does this also mean that, during the last documentary, the spirits already knew that homeboy was going to come by the puzzle? Or maybe they were just throwing anything they deemed useful at him… 

Either way: so what does the solved cypher say?

 

After a hike through the woods, homeboy finally finds what he’s been looking for, and... 

Well, what exactly does he do next, because…

We can see him standing over the “X that marks the spot” and then: cut to a body being dug up and a brush cleaning the dirt off the bones, and I’m like……… is   h e  doing that?

Because we can hear him calling the police in the background, but at no point does he show them arriving, and we know he’s not impartial to digging up human remains solo (*cough* the teeth *cough*), plus, would they allow him to film such invasive close ups of skull, in the midst of them doing their job, inside of what is, essentially, a crime scene?

Like…. I   d o n ‘ t   k n o w , but what I do know is: Susan Forrester has been found. 

That’s one body recovery under homeboy’s belt, 14 more to go!

… wait, 14 more to go tho? 

but I thought 8 victims had already been found, which would put us at 9   

18 – 9 = (lemme count my fingers)  8   

...

Okay, I think I know what happened: homeboy saw how incompetent the local police was and he figured they had miscounted the corpses by like, 6.   

Or maybe, since only 4 families have agreed to be in the documentary, he forgot that the rest of them existed… It happens.

   

 

Either way: there are more bodies to find!  

The search will continue in the next instalment, and there is already a new trace to follow: inside Susan’s burial they found a message in a bottle, and it shows a map! 

 

Well, all well what ends well, not only homeboy managed to connect with the ghosts well enough to finally understand what they needed from him, it would seem that that conversation with Terry was the wake-up call he needed to snap out of his slumber, and step-up in his marriage too….  L o v e l y.

I think the scares of this instalment were   p r o b a b l y   my favourites so far, and I enjoyed feeling like we were finally making progress and getting some resolutions, both in homeboy's personal life and in the investigation. 

That being said... As I mentioned in the beginning, going in I hardly had any memories of this episode, eventually, I started remembering some bits and pieces, but it was right at the end when a core memory hit me like a truck: the very daunting feeling I felt, when the sentence 

"there are allegedly 10 more bodies left to find " 

was uttered.  

I distinctly remember thinking "jesus christ I hope it's not gonna be one body per movie" because, while I was still interested in the storyline as there are, obviously, still a few lose ends that need wrapping (the fucking banging in the corridor), that felt like a concerning level of future commitment to it...  

And while that idea didn't come true, we still made it to at a point where the saga could rightfully switch names to "The Lightfoot Ghosts" (with all due respect to Miss Blackwell) and... well, I  t h i n k  I hope we move on to something else soon.

But for now, i'm still in it, and really looking forward to watching the next one!

My Favourite Found Footage Movies

The real reason why i'm single, is because I have so many mockumentaries and found footage movies  i n  m y   h e a r t , that there isn't space for anything else.

I decided to put together a little “Top 10”, but with fewer entries than a top 10 would have, cause I also wished to be selective 💅.

I tried my best to rank the movies but the result is a bit rough, since I love so many of them equally. 

Just in case someone wants to check them out, i cut back on the spoilers as much as possible.        

REC (2007)

I mean, do I need to say anything? This is just a found footage masterpiece.

Journalist extraordinaire Angela Vidal is merrily reporting on the nightly activities of Barcelona's firefighters, when she unexpectedly joins them on a call: they need to do a wellness check on an old lady, who has been heard yelling inside an apartment building.  

This sounds like an easy day on the job....  u n l e s s. 

This movie is very intense, and it's honestly insane how well choreographed the scenes are.  

EXHIBIT A  (2007)

Oh, how I love FF movies that explore human tragedies, and this is really one for the ages.

The King family is getting ready to move to a bigger house, since father Andy has finally landed a good job promotion… weirdly tho, as moving day approaches, he starts acting more and more strangely. Young daughter Judith decides to film his odd behaviour, in the hopes of making some sense of it and, potentially, help him through whatever is happening.     

The movie gets progressively more grim and the ending is   v e r y   hard to watch. As much as i love the paranormal takes on the genre, realistic plots like this one really hit different, and uncomfortably close to home at times...

A NECESSARY DEATH  (2008)

I’m not 100% sure this one classifies as horror, as it’s probably more of a drama, but it does contain a scene that made me physically cringe and, subsequently, pause the movie to make sure that it was actually a FALSE documentary cause “Jesus Christ what am I watching”.

The plot revolves around a crew of film students and the subject of their documentary: a suicidal man, whose life they are going to document for a month… up until the day he commits the final act.                      

What can  p o s s i b l y   go wrong while working on such an ethical nightmare of a project, well: plenty.

The movie poses a lot of ethical questions and I enjoyed seeing how the various characters, each with their own personalities, end up responding to the development of the events. 

Eventually, the movie takes a bit of an unexpected turn, which I really enjoyed, and the ending was great… well, as great as it can be.

 

 CREEP  (2014)

This movie tells the story of Aaron, a broke videographer who answers a weird job offer by a dying man called Joseph, looking to film a memorial for his son.

The first time I watched this film I was only 60% on board going into the ending cause… well, the protagonist could’ve been a tad bit brighter, but then….  IT  happens... AND THEN the final speech regarding Aaron’s kind nature completely drew me in, like: 

SURE, you know what, everything makes sense, that man would 100% behave like that, 10/10

 Additionally, Mark Duplass is an absolute blast.

I fucking hate the sequel btw.

 

GRAVE ENCOUNTERS  (2011)

To me, Grave Encounters is the   q u i n t e s s e n t i a l  found footage movie, it’s got everything: a haunted asylum, night vision, a troupe of paranormal investigators and, obviously, ghosts.

It’s a really good time and also, tag yourself cause: I’m cameraman T. C. Gibson. 

I swear I’ve never felt so connected to a character before. If I were stuck in such a situation, I’d also have absolutely zero patience: you'd hear me curse like a sailor and yell “let’s get FUCKING MOVING” every five seconds…  I’d be absolutely unbearable, and also absolutely on business.   

 

TROLL HUNTER  (2010)

A Swedish mockumentary about a man who works for the government as a “troll hunter”, with the mansion of managing the country’s troll population, while making sure it stays hidden from the public’s eye. 

It’s a huge environmentalist statement, a commentary on how we’ve been destroying other specie’s habitats and damaging their resources.                                                                                                         

I found it to be a really powerful movie, with some hard hitting lines and surprisingly good effects.

 

THE OUTWATERS  (2022)

Yes, I am one of the 3 people who genuinely liked this movie.

The plot revolves around a group of friends filming a music video in the desert when  c h a o s  ensues and, trust me when i say this, the word "c h a o s" is not enough to describe whatever tf is going on.

Most of the movie is seen from the POV of Robbie, the video director. Just as shit is starting to unfold, darling gets smacked violently in the head by a baddie, which caused me to automatically interpret all the things that followed, as hallucinations induced by the concussion.                                

Well you should’ve seen my face when, as the protagonist is looking at his brother covered in blood sitting on the wing of an airplane, it suddenly dawned on me:

Oh my god wait 

this is found footage  👁👄👁  this was inside the SD of a videocamera…… 

it’s not in his head, it’s real…………………………………………

I’m not gonna lie, it took me a second to get back on board after that, but I still loved it!

To be fair, I wouldn’t have minded being able to see more than 5% of the screen, the flashlight they use really has an abysmal cone of vision.

BUT ALSO, it brought to mind a very small Doraemon flashlight I own, which has the amazing feature of projecting images from the cartoon…

 wouldn’t it have been beautiful if they had used that instead?

Some honourable mentions:                                                             

GHOSTWATCH  (1992)

SAVAGELAND  (2015)

The entire population of an American border town has been massacred overnight. The investigations lead to the arrest of the sole survivor, but the photographs he took seem to tell a different story, one that is, sadly, very hard to believe...  

 One of the very first mockumentaries ever produced, it caused so much chaos among the TV viewers of the time, that the BBC swepped it under the rug completely, for decades. I recommend giving it a watch, if anything, to get acquainted with a different meaning of the term "glory whole".  

 

And, for the ones who wish to take a risk:

MURDER DEATH
KOREATOWN  (2020)

LIVESCREAM  (2018)

This one's for the gamers out there, especially the ones that fancy themselves a little livestream. In a way that is exquisitely canonical, this movie can be enojyed as a video on youtube. Is it absolutely amazing? Maybe not. Did i still enjoy it a lot? Absolutely.

  

  

You know how I mentioned having soft spot for FF movies that explore the human mind? Well, this one fell perfectly into that category... up until the last 10 minutes, when it completely threw me for a loop. 

Due to that I'm not fully sure how i feel about it, but the journey before the destination was great.