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"The Veil" (2016) is a film that I was interested in after seeing its trailer, which made it look promising. I became a fan of Lily Rabe after her awesome performances on multiple seasons of "American Horror Story" and Thomas Jane makes just about any movie more tolerable for me, so in all honesty, I was somewhat excited about watching this. I am always looking forward to watching brand new horror movies, but I am almost always let down by them. Unfortunately, this movie was no exception.
After the mass suicide of a religious cult led by Thomas Jane's character, Jim "Drink the punch" Jones, one 5 year old girl is the sole survivor. The movie started out promising when the camera finds this little girl all alone, surrounded by dead bodies, and she calmly says, "Don't worry, they'll be back." Yikes. However, it's basically all downhill from here.
Thomas Jane as Jim Jones
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Right away we are brought back to modern times to find that little girl, named Sarah Hope (Lily Rabe), is now an adult and a film crew led by Maggie (Jessica Alba) wants to take Sarah back to the scene of the mass suicide in order to look for footage that the cult had filmed, but was not previously found. Yes, we are expected to suspend disbelief and be content with that fact that - after the mass death of these people and a huge FBI investigation complete with lots of news coverage - not only was camera footage left undiscovered, but we also find at least one dead body.
"Whaaat?"
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From here, there is no point in going further into the plot because it is pretty generic. With the exception of some flashbacks of the cult via the film reels that the FBI left sitting around, this movie was boring. If you enjoy watching actors sit around pretending to watch something else and gasp every once in awhile, have fun with this! But do note that there are many continuity issues and very little suspense. It is impossible to care about any of the characters, in part because they make ridiculous decisions. Even after a member of Maggie's crew DIES, she wants to stay and keep her ridiculous investigation going. I don't see her motivation going that deep here. And why the hell did the crew stay there with her? Any reasonable person would wish her well and start the long fucking hike out of that place! But no - we have 90 minutes to fill here, people, and we can't do it with only Jessica Alba!
Although Thomas Jane was crazy fun as the cult leader and I did like the way the movie ended (mostly just because the modern day characters annoyed me), I found the twists to be painfully obvious... which is actually saying quite a lot, because I am usually the last to guess what is going to happen.
"Just got back from the Spirit Realm. Selfie time!"
(image from Google search - horrorfreaknews.com)
The idea that people can be brainwashed into believing a religion or belief system that some (usually obviously insane) person made up is fascinating to me. I'll never get tired of reading or hearing about The Manson Family. Jonestown has disturbed me since I first heard about it as a young girl. I believe that my sole reason for watching "The Sacrament" (2013) was simply its subject matter. However, now that I have seen "The Veil", I realize "The Sacrament" was actually better than I initially thought.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for finding out what sort of madness the supernatural realm may hold, and I most certainly don't need my horror movies to be based in realism (my all-time favorite horror film franchise is "A Nightmare on Elm Street" if proof of that is needed). However, if this film spent more time exploring the cult and less time showing the modern day characters behaving like morons, I probably would have liked it a lot more.
Especially in comparison to other recently released horror films I've seen though, I still cannot say that I truly did not like this movie. And so, it gets a middle of the road score...
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Sarah Hope hopes you all enjoy meeting her family.
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