Review of Paranormal Activity

Here's another un-film pretending to be someone's home video, and gutting the language of movie-making. Construction is fragmentary; movement, composition, and juxtaposition are next to meaningless; and however any such movie is shot, it ends up looking like all the others. A few talented directors, perhaps seeing those limits as a challenge, have managed to do relatively interesting things within the form, e.g. the way Jaume Balagueró staged Rec so that the actions looked accidental rather than choreographed. By contrast, PA is just a series of indifferently written, poorly shot scenes depicting a few unexciting incidents experienced by unintelligent characters in an uninteresting setting. If most horror films are basically twenty-minute stories with padding, this one is a three-minute story--in effect a YouTube joke clip, except that you have to wait forever to get to the punchline, and when you do it makes no sense. The film does succeed as a demo reel for Katie Featherston, whose impersonation of a reality-show subject is convincing enough to carry the show, or would be if there were a show to carry. This one is so much nothing.