Warning! Standards may be lower than they appear: A review of Beneath

As soon as I saw that MTV logo pop up at the beginning of Beneath, I started sighing and fidgeting and hoping the movie would rush to the finale so I could hurry up and be disappointed. However I have yet to turn off a movie part way through, I'm a bit masochistic that way I guess. I started picking the movie apart; the acting is bad, the direction is incompetent, the script is boring, the runtime is laughable, but then I started actually paying attention.

The acting is.. well never mind. The best I can say is it's no worse than I expected. The direction I started enjoying once the mother started getting some screen time, director Dagen Merrill seems to do a lot better with the darker shots and the more intense scenes. This was especially apparent to me at the end of the movie, with the grand revelation and what I guess could be called a chase scene, though it's like no chase you would imagine. It was a welcome change from the usual feel of "ok it's over, let's just rush through and finish it off," barring the very last shot which I have a sneaking suspicion was added at MTV's request. The script surprised me to be perfectly honest, there were some genuinely unexpected twists which was refreshing. It's nice to go "oh god please don't let it be.. oh uh ok, they didn't" for once.

The plot revolves around Christy (Nora Zehetner) and visions she has of her sister Vanessa (Carly Pope) who died following a car crash that Christy survived. It's not made immediately clear if she is hallucinating or if she is seeing through the eyes of her sister, who she comes to believe was buried alive. This is where the script really shines as they take us through the reactions of people around Christy as well as her own doubts about her sanity. The story of what really happened between Vanessa, her nurse Claire (Eliza Norbury), John (Matthew Settle) and his mother (Gabrielle Rose) is very slowly and methodically revealed, which again was unexpected and showed that the short run time of 82 minutes was actually a positive sign. I even wanted to be annoyed with Christy's niece Amy (Jessica Amlee), you know, child actors and all that, but she served her place in the script so I can't really complain. The makeup effects on Vanessa were very solid and the flash-shot of something scary and dark accompanied by a high pitched sound, that oh so necessary element of horror movies, worked that much better because of it.

One of the few gripes I have about this movie would have to be the acting but again, it's no worse than is to be expected from low-grade horror. And while this turned out to be better than average low-grade horror, I was so drawn in the by the story I barely noticed the cheesy overacting displayed by our leads. The only other thing I can think of as being negative was the pace towards the beginning was a little slower than it needed to be. Story-wise it worked, laid out the background and what was to happen later on well, but character-wise I really had no empathy which was most likely a by-product of the quality of acting.

Beneath has all the trappings of a b-grade-but-somehow-got-greenlit horror movie, but it rises above the average thanks to a surprising amount originality in the script, written by Kevin Burke and director Dagen Merrill. If you've passed this movie over or turned it off part way through, you owe it to yourself to watch it all the way to the finish. In fact this movie was so out of the ordinairy in a good way that I just realized now there were no boobs in it.