FILM REVIEW - DAY 13

It’s not that the film is boring. It’s actually pretty engaging. It’s just that the engagement mostly comes in the form of frustration at some of the creative decisions they went with. MacNicoll is fine as Colton, a bit bland sometimes, but the character himself is awful. He starts out as Generic Moody Teen Archetype #7: resentful of his mother dating and annoyed by his younger sister existing. The family arguments are tedious and grating, and don’t even set anything up considering the mother goes on holiday and is gone from the film forever.

Cast:
Alex MacNicoll, Martin Kove, Genevieve Hannelius, Darlene Vogel
Director: Jax Medel
Writer: Dan Gannon | Walter Goldwalter
Producer: Richard C. Brooks
Genre: Horror / Thriller
Language: English
Production Country: United States

Alfred Hitchcock has a lot to answer for. Sure he made superb thrillers, but did he ever stop to think about the legions of knock-offs, homages and copycats he’d inspire? Rear Window provided a template for films about housebound snoopers obsessed with their neighbours’ misdeeds, one that filmmakers are happy to refer to over and over again.
 
Case in point. I was expecting a serious Satanic Panic but I got a frustrating and clunky Rear Window instead.
 
Day 13 is a thriller, the first feature film for director Jax Medel and writers Dan Gannon & Walter Goldwater. We follow teenager Colton (Alex MacNicoll, who looks distractingly like a 30 year old) as he becomes obsessed with the house across the road. Formerly empty, it’s now occupied by love interest Heather (Genevieve Hannelius) and her mysterious guardian Magnus Torvald (Martin Kove, though I mistook him for Mark Kermode on first glance and couldn’t shake the resemblance after that). Colton’s certain that Magnus is up to no good, and comes to believe that Magnus is preparing to sacrifice Heather in an evil Satanic ritual. The cops won’t believe him, so it’s up to Colton to save her…
 
Where do I start with this? Tell you what, I’ll start at the beginning where the movie started – with 2  full minutes of credits over a black screen. There’s no surer sign that a film is going to stretch itself to breaking point to hit feature length than an overly long credits sequence while nothing happens. And sure enough, we’re treated throughout the film to repetitive shots of Colton staring through his window at night, looking at nothing very much while ominous music plays. There’s even a pointless dream sequence towards the end to take up a handy five minutes. Every little helps.
 
It’s not that the film is boring. It’s actually pretty engaging. It’s just that the engagement mostly comes in the form of frustration at some of the creative decisions they went with. MacNicoll is fine as Colton, a bit bland sometimes, but the character himself is awful. He starts out as Generic Moody Teen Archetype #7: resentful of his mother dating and annoyed by his younger sister existing. The family arguments are tedious and grating, and don’t even set anything up considering the mother goes on holiday and is gone from the film forever.
 
One night Colton sees some lights flickering in the house across the street and is curious – fair enough. It happens again, and then he sees the shadowy figure of Magnus moving in at night. This is weird, so what does he do? Does he go over in the morning to introduce himself to his new neighbour?
 
No. Instead he buys $600 worth of surveillance equipment to spy on the house.
 
This is… it’s baffling. Nothing sinister has happened to precipitate this, no matter how badly the music wants us to believe that the house is spooky. He just immediately jumps to spying. He only meets Heather because he goes onto the property and tries to get into the chained basement, despite knowing that someone’s moved in now. And despite Heather seeing perfectly normal, he keeps spying on the house, even capturing her showering (which, ew, this is our hero?).
 
Heather discovers this and doesn’t immediately call the cops, instead letting him continue his surveillance on her guardian – this is initially ludicrous and is the point where I started to check out, but in fairness it does make some sense in light of the film’s ending. It’s just such an unrealistic action otherwise that the rest of the film suffers for it because it shatters the immersion.
 
I’m not going to go into too much more detail, though I could easily rant for pages about how off and weird it all is. One of Colton’s cameras is literally focused on a lawn sprinkler. Why? Because the audience needs to see it, of course, which would be fair enough if there were any reason at all that Colton would have for pointing a camera at that specific sprinkler. Colton does some research on the house in a library, which apparently stocks scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings about that specific house? Why not just stick to internet research, which we saw him do (and incidentally, if you want to look at someone’s online purchase history, you won’t get far by just doing a search for their name, which must be why the scene abruptly ended and we never found out what Magnus was buying).
 
At one point near the climax I had to throw my hands up and take a step away for a moment. After a dangerous near-miss one night, Colton decides he needs to rescue Heather right-now-straight-away… and then he has a nap, giving us the aforementioned pointless dream sequence. The lack of logic here is so frustrating, and it feels like they needed to pad the film out so dropped a dream sequence there even though he’d just said how time-sensitive this rescue was. Gah!
 
It’s not all bad, though. It’s competently shot for the most part, and like I said, MacNicoll is fine and Hannelius is very endearing. I don’t buy their romance for a second, but that’s not their fault. The best performance is of course Mark Kermo- sorry, sorry, Martin Kove. He’s appropriately sinister when needed and makes for a great axe-wielding villain.
 
It’s just a shame that the entire conflict could be avoided with one conversation. I won’t say more on that because spoilers, but one long chat would have ended the film 40 minutes in. But then we’d have been spared the frankly hilarious ending – I don’t think it was meant to be funny, but it was the highlight of the film for me!

I wish I could be more positive about Day 13. It’s the first feature for the creative team and the actors did the best they could with what they had. It’s not a bad concept, it just could have been handled so much better.

2 ginger biscuits out of 5

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