Cry No Fear

Over the past few years, local studios have been trying to experiment with different genres. For example, Viva Films tried out found footage horror with last year's Darkroom. This time, with Richard Somes' Cry No Fear, it's a home invasion thriller, but unfortunately the results are quite disappointing.

Kaycee (Donnalyn Bartolome) and Wendy (Ella Cruz) are half sisters. Because of that fact, they aren't exactly the best of friends. During one particularly rainy day, they are targeted by a murderous family and must work together to survive, or else.

To make an effective home invasion thriller, one has to know how to effectively convey the story within a confined space. The thrill comes from the cat and mouse game between invaders and victims, and the terror comes from the loss of safety that a home invasion embodies.  There has to be a sense of claustrophobia to ratchet up the tension, else things fall apart quickly.

In this case, the filmmaking ultimately comes up a bit short. The cinematography largely consists of a lot of extreme closeup shots, whether the scene is supposed to be tense or not. While it helps capture the emotions of the lead characters well enough, it makes certain scenes (like chase scenes) harder to parse, especially without a wider establishing shot. It's too bad that in trying to create a claustrophobic feeling, the film manages to overdo it. The editing also feels muddled and disorganized, making the film even harder to understand.

The film's internal logic is inconsistent, structured poorly, and strains suspension of disbelief. A hand is dislocated, but is more or less normal after a few scenes. There is one particular scene where a dog is killed and decapitated. The head is initially missing, so the protagonists decide to bury the dog's body in the park, which I assume is far from their house (and far from relative safety) because it was their dog's favorite place. And when the dog's severed head shows up in the house a few scenes later, despite the fact that there is a serious threat to their lives lurking outside the house, they decide to go back to the park AGAIN, for the sake of a certain contrivance near the end. Throughout the film, for the sake of a plot device, the characters are made out to be idiots.

And then there's the weird stuff. The film seems to be aiming to titillate and fails spectacularly. In the first half of the film, there seems to be an inordinate amount of attention focused on Donnalyn Bartolome's legs - in fact, the film literally begins with a panning shot of her legs. This is turned up to eleven when a later phone conversation keeps cutting back to her legs instead of her talking on the phone. Patricia Javier is also in the movie, and there just HAD to be a sexy scene with her right in the middle of the film. It does nothing to the plot, and it undoes the effect of some of the scenes directly preceding it. It's gratuitous and distracting.

The glaring missteps in the making of Cry No Fear are highlighted even more considering that another horror film, Hereditary, debuted at the same time, and nails everything Cry No Fear did wrong, in terms of creating tension and claustrophobia through camerawork and editing. Cry No Fear is a prime example of why technical skill and directing should properly complement an inventive concept.