One can detect a weight of influence in this fine, queasy horror set across five decades in an impressively creepy Massachusetts house. Beezel is not, strictly speaking, a found-footage horror – not just that, anyway – but it riffs on the tropes established by that genre over the past 25 years. It has fun with variations on fetid, squelchy notions of how a witch might age if she were left in a basement for a century too long. But the film also feels oddly of its moment, taking place in a similar lonely, rural space to that from whence the recent Longlegs emerged. What is this taste for wind-blasted misery tell us about the current US psyche?
We begin in 1966 with a genuinely unsettling moment of domestic unease. A young boy hears scratching from a cupboard and, when he opens the doors, finds his mother peering up from a hitherto unsuspected space. She is sooooo hungry. Well, that’s never a good sign. That doesn’t suggest we’re headed for a knockabout comedy.
Anyway, more than 20 years later, the current owner, suspected of killing his family, invites a videographer to assist in efforts at vindication. Then, in 2013, we meet a young carer here to supervise an older woman in babbling decline. The closest thing to a core story is the longer final section that finds a couple, inheritors of the property, arriving to prepare for a hoped sale. They’ll be lucky. The local kids, in Stephen King style, have taken to singing scary songs as they run past. A food-delivery man stays on the doorstep barely long enough to hand over the bag. Graffiti taunts the witch.
The acting is a tad inconsistent. The structure is necessarily episodic. But Aaron Fradkin, who grew up in western Massachusetts, makes a virtue of the bleak landscape and works hard at making the snippets of found footage a part of the story. In the second section the householder tells the visiting videographer how he favours the richness of celluloid. The media itself comes to represent the progress of time towards an inevitably awful denouement.
Angelina Jolie: ‘It’s usually just me alone with my kids. I actually have quite a private life’
50 people to watch in 2025: From film and music to arts, activism, sport and more
Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+: 10 of the best new shows to watch in January
Tang restaurant review: Delicious food, charming service, keen prices ... this is in a league of its own
The premiere of Beezel here on video and streaming alone is something of a disappointment. Many worse horror titles will make it to cinemas throughout the coming year. This is pulp as pulp should be.
On Blu-ray, DVD and digital download from Monday, January 6th
