I am not a fan of cinemas. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. I particularly detest going to cinemas. I prefer watching movies in the comfort of my own home, with my own popcorn and unlimited condiments from my fridge for my hotdog. The only times I go to a cinema are when I’m forced into it.

Today was one of those occasions. While movies that I would naturally find more interesting like Mufasa, Sonic 3 and Brave New World were playing, I couldn’t buy a ticket to any of them because they belong to a class of movies that me and my sister always watch together. It’s sacred. Since she wasn’t with me today, it came down to this bunch:

  • The Painted
  • Wolf Man
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Jeanne Du Barry

Jeanne Du Barry is French and while it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to test my B1 French skills (yes, I have a diploma,) it just didn’t seem like the best thing to watch in a cinema with other people. A friend told me that The Count of Monte Cristo was easily the best movie in the list but I knew that it wasn’t the right choice either since it wasn’t a horror movie and that’s what my wife wanted to watch. Came down to Wolf Man and The Painted. My friend told me that he had already seen Wolf Man and that it was good enough, not great, and even though he hadn’t seen The Painted, he was confident that Wolf Man would win easily.

Now here’s the problem. Days before I even began this analysis, we had already decided to watch The Painted. However, I had begun to question that choice when I realized that googling it mostly yielded results for other movies with similar names because The Painted didn’t even have a Wikipedia article despite having being out for a couple of months.

Before we proceed, let me tell you a tiny story: Some years ago, me and my sister decided to finally watch The Boy. It had been out for quite some time by then and we’d both seen the trailer for it and, I kid you not, we had both thought that it might be too scary for us and had chosen not to watch it. Until the monumental day when we finally took the plunge. Today, for me and my sister, it’s one of our best memories. We enjoyed that movie in a way it was never meant to be enjoyed: We found it to be ridiculously hilarious.

As I relived those fond memories, I decided to take a chance with The Painted if its trailer turned out to be as intriguing as that of The Boy. Thankfully, the trailer was easy to find and it did indeed seem to promise as fun an experience as the boy. Paintings coming to life? Sold. If anything, this is as close as it gets to a movie about a doll coming to life without being a complete ripoff. I shared these observations with my wife and she agreed that this was the right thing to do.

The next day, we made it to the cinema early noon to catch the first show of the day for The Painted. We reached the ticket counter 5 minutes before movie was scheduled to start, only for them to inform us that we were the first ones in and that a movie needs to sell at least six tickets to be screened. We stood there waiting for 4 other idiots to join us. Luckily, two groups of two arrived shortly afterwards and the ticket counter guy was pleased to inform us that the movie started on time. Only, we were still downstairs thanks to him keeping us there. Makes no sense right? First they make us wait then they start the movie before even punching our tickets.

The starting was pretty textbook: Family, kids, making ends meet, getting lucky and moving to a nice house that under normal circumstances would have been unaffordable. As usual, initially the family members individually experience the supernatural and, like in most movies, don’t make a lot of it as a family. However, one distinction here was that everyone did seem to believe that nobody was lying but, at the same time, didn’t really seem all that inclined to do anything about it.

The supernatural scenes early on are well shot, good camera angles, not too many effects. And the music really plays a major role. I’d say some of the scenes wouldn’t even be scary if it wasn’t for the music, but since the music is present, the scenes get a good score in my opinion. No pun intended. During the latter half, however, some of the occurrences missed it by a few inches. They weren’t necessarily bad. The visual effects, while not state-of-the-art, were still good enough if not great, the events themselves were not even remotely out of context or exaggerated. They just weren’t really scary.

The story wasn’t bad at all. The idea had great potential and while you’d expect there to have already been lots of movies about paintings coming to life, a quick google search would tell you that this domain was actually surprisingly untapped before this. I do however think the execution had a lot of room for improvement. The ending was a bit dragged out for the sake of constant suspense and while there was a slight unpredictability factor, nothing really was much of a surprise. The lore behind the happenings was only acceptable and cliche with some people in the past doing some really bad things for some kind of personal gain. The rituals were underimagined but I don’t blame anyone for not having a deeper knowledge of how a satanic ritual should appear on screen.

Lastly, the acting: Definitely missed a mark or two but was still very far from bad. In fact, I am not even sure if it’s the actors or the directors who should take the blame here. I would even go as far as to say that the younger actors showed great potential.

Overall, I think it was a fun experience. I enjoyed the movie both in the way it was meant to be enjoyed and also in the way it wasn’t. (Hint: The Boy) I think Sasha Sibley has shown great potential here. As of now, I am unable to find much information about this movie so I am not sure how high the budget for this was, but I am gonna assume two things here:

  1. The budget was far from astronomical.
  2. The movie probably easily exceeds expectations for whatever the budget actually was.

I wish Sasha the best of luck with his future projects and might even keep an eye out for them and see how his work progresses. I recently discovered that this movie was preceded by a short film by the same name and I plan to watch and review that. Same goes for his first feature-film, The Box. I also went ahead and created a Wikipedia article for this movie since it doesn’t seem to exist and might be helpful for other people like me who want to read a thing or two before buying the ticket. Sadly, I am being met with a little friction by the moderators that I am trying to overcome.