Everything Wrong with Modern Film Criticism

I've debated if I should post what I'm about to say.  I think that reviewing other reviews is often a dangerous road to go down.  Whether you're the person behind the work that's being critiqued or just an interested party, there's rarely any good that can come from providing a dissection of other people's reviews.

But for the past week I've been annoyed by a trend that popped up in the reviews for my friends' movie Devil's Due.  Critics didn't receive it terribly well, though that's not unusual for a found-footage horror film.  As much as I liked it and hoped it would be well-received, I wasn't completely blindsided by the fact that critics made a meal of it.

But what did get under my skin is that I saw a number of reviews where it was clear that the reviewer didn't even give the film a chance.  When several paragraphs of a review focus not so much on the specifics of the film, but rather the reviewer's fatigue with found-footage, I think we have a problem.  I think when you're hired to review a specific movie, the focus should be reviewing the movie - not using the film as an excuse to get into your specific issues with a genre.

And the more I thought about this, the more I realized that my issues with these reviews were just scratching the surface of what was wrong with the way films today are examined.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start off by looking at statements like this one from Todd Gilchrist of The Wrap:

Generally speaking, I have no problem suspending disbelief in order to enjoy found-footage horror – of course there’s no good reason for them to film all of the time. But “Devil’s Due” distinguishes itself, much to its detriment, by making a huge show of the characters’ reasoning, and then packaging their entirely self-sustaining “home movies” in between recordings of a police interrogation of one of the survivors. 

And the fact that the police don’t seem to believe the suspect, despite what is very obviously a mountain of footage evidencing their innocence, suggests that they didn’t find, or see, the material we’re watching. So how exactly can you have a found footage movie, if no one finds it?

Unlike The Blair Witch Project, Devil's Due makes no claims that the footage we are seeing is an assembled documentary.  It merely uses the technique of telling the story through cameras that capture the action.  It's an approach that was used rather effectively in Chronicle, and it's apparent from the first time the film cuts to the perspective of a supermarket security camera that we aren't going to be wedded to Zach's own camera.

And yet Gilchrist wasn't the only reviewer who got hung up on this non-issue.  FlickFilosopher.com spent half their review digging into this:

This is the problem: A found-footage movie is supposedly more than merely a film for our putative enjoyment. It’s supposed to be a document, an artifact, of the world it’s set in. If the found footage is from one source — say, the memory card from the videocam some idiot used to record an investigation into a witch legend, or a monster attack, or, ahem, his own honeymoon — then, sure, this one tape was literally “found.” But when the “found-footage” consists of material edited together from multiple sources in ways that fail all plausibility tests, then something is badly wrong. 

I mean, look: I can buy that Samantha McCall (Allison Miller: 17 Again), a newlywed young woman still in school who doesn’t even want to be pregnant yet and had taken responsible steps to prevent it, might have gotten knocked up by Old Scratch in some crazy evil candlelit rite in the basement of a nightclub in Santo Domingo. What I cannot figure out, for the life of me, is this: Who assembled this footage? It cannot be her husband, Zach (Zach Gilford: The Last Stand, Post Grad), the dude with the video-documenting fetish, because as the film opens, we’re seeing police-interview video of him covered in blood being asked to explain just what happened — which we know he won’t be able to do because what cop or lawyer or jury is gonna believe “it wasn’t me it was Satan”? (And we know it was Satan responsible for whatever we’re about to watch in flashback, because the title tells us so.) 

But even if we could concoct a scenario in which he is exonerated and goes on to do some editing, huge chunks of the film consist of footage from cameras Satan’s minions secrete in the McCall house and other material that he doesn’t have access to and, in other cases, is probably not even aware of. The only other possible explanation is that the minions of Satan did some editing (using Lucifer’s supernatural powers to find the other footage), but why? They’re doing all their demonic babymaking in secret: they’d hardly assemble in one handy place all the evidence against them that reveals their diabolical plan. 

And then we have Mountain Xpress harping on the same point:

We are supposed to believe that it was cobbled together (by whom, I have no clue) from home video footage and security cameras. Banana oil. It's just a jumble of shaky, wobbly images that couldn't possibly be what they're claimed to be. Granted, the whole found-footage premise is played out and pointless, but you could at least pretend this footage (including footage that's stolen by the satanists part-way through the proceedings) could be real. 

Need I remind you the film never "claims" to be an actual documentary?

Even the New York Times got in on the act:

Though apparently pieced together from a variety of sources — including supermarket and police interview tapes — the film never reveals who did the piecing.

Screenrant:

This film and so many others in the genre seem to have abandoned the idea that this footage must conceivably be found at some point. Switching perspective to cameras that no one is ever going to find is a cheat, pure and simple.)

A "cheat?" Really?

And CraveOnline:

That element of the found footage genre – y'know, that the footage was actually found – is now completely absent, as evidenced in a film like Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's and Tyler Gillet's Devil's Due. The shaky-cam, low-watt filmmaking is now less an indicator of the would-be snuff film aesthetic that was once a highlight of these movies, and has been reduced to mere affect, style, and an easily mocked formula. In Devil's Due, perspective switches rapidly from the camcorder-happy protagonist, occasional security camera footage, and even numerous shots from mysterious hidden cameras insides the protagonists home (hidden cameras placed by… who could it be??). In such a case, you, as a viewer, can only begin asking the most inappropriate questions about who found all this footage, and why they are assembling it for us. 

I mean....

Riddle me this, Batman. When is a plothole not a plothole? When it's completely invented by the reviewer.  Is it fair for a critic to build a box, then flunk the film for not fitting into it when the film itself explicitly avoids that box?  That's really dirty pool.

Look, I'm not saying everyone should have loved Devil's Due, but I'd have a lot more respect for a negative review that seems to hate it for fair reasons. The Wrap's review also had this gem of an unfair attack:

Suffice it to say casting one of the stars of “Friday Night Lights” in a main role and hiring hugely recognizable character actor Sam Anderson (“Lost,” “WKRP”) further undermines any sense that this is real, much less believable. 

We're 15 years from the time of The Blair Witch Project, which was probably the last time you could effectively dupe an audience into believing that a found-footage movie was an actual documentary.  Part-and-parcel of that showmanship tends to be that filmmakers cast unfamiliar faces to further the pretense this actually happened.

The problem with that is that a lot of found-footage films suffer for exactly the result you'd expect when you cast a lot of untested talent - weak performances.  A genre with the potential for the greatest level of intimacy is then hobbled by showcasing inadequate interpreters for the drama.  This (and the Paranormal Activity series) is a major studio release.  Is there any portion of the audience that would buy a ticket to this expecting it's any more real than Jack Ryan?  It's not like anyone flipped out because Captain Kirk wasn't Captain Kirk, but rather a CIA analyst.

I'd point out that it's not too uncommon for found footage actors to end up in studio films soon after.  Even if the whole film marketing is predicated on fooling the audience into thinking this is all "real," that shelf life is pretty short when a year later, the leads are staring on a CW series or popping up in rom-coms.  Two stars of 2012's Project X ended up in rather high profile projects within a year of that film's release.  Alexis Knapp turned up in Pitch Perfect and Miles Teller starred in The Spectacular Now.

But for that matter, found footage has long been making use of known actors.  Let's look back six years to Cloverfield.  Lizzy Caplan was four years removed from a very visible part in Mean Girls, to say nothing of numerous TV roles in that time.  Odette Yustman and T.J. Miller had also each done a TV series and Mike Vogel and Jessica Lucas had even more extensive TV resumes.   The aforementioned Chronicle also made use of familiar talent.

So the idea that found footage must star complete unknowns hasn't existed for a long time.  Why is this still considered a valid attack on any film in this genre?

Also, it takes a special kind of balls to call out a film for being derivative while using a review gimmick explicitly stolen from another reviewer.

I miss Roger Ebert. He always judged a film by weighing what it accomplished against what it set out to achieve.  It was this approach that lead to an infamous argument with Gene Siskel over the fact Ebert gave Benji The Hunted a "thumbs up" on the same show where he gave Full Metal Jacket a "thumbs down."

Modern film criticism is in sad shape, and to some extent, I trace a lot of this back to Red Letter Media's original 70-minute video deconstruction of The Phantom Menace.  I think there's one very astute and absolutely brilliant insight in there.  At one point, the reviewer challenges Star Wars fans to describe franchise characters without referencing their occupation or their clothing.  As you might expect, those questioned are able to give very in-depth answers when describing Han Solo or C-3PO.  When the topic turns to prequel characters, they start grasping at straws.  It's a brilliant indictment of how thin the prequel characters often are, done in a very clever way.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the lesson too many took from Red Letter Media (and I include RLM himself in this indictment) is that what made the review awesome was that it had enough material to fill 70 minutes.  Thus it beget an even longer autopsy of Attack of the Clones in which the "flaws" felt more like fanboy whining and failed to be dissected in a manner half as amusing as in the original video.

But the agenda seemed to have shifted from giving interesting lessons about drama to providing a comprehensive checklist of every perceived "sin" of the prequels, no matter how small. This is the theory behind those incredibly annoying "Everything Wrong With..." videos that frequently take potshots at major films.  There they list everything they think is a sin, no matter how pedantic.  Sometimes they identify valid plotting and character issues - but those fair points are often listed alongside minor continuity errors and gaffes.

Quality of criticism appears to be less valued than quantity of criticism.  After all, the more things you find "wrong" with a film, and the more words you can generate in tearing it down, the more objectively worse it must be, right?  Give me a succinct Roger Ebert deconstruction any day over a review that takes longer to read or watch than a full episode of Siskel & Ebert.

(I fully realize the irony of taking such a stand in what has to be one of my longer posts of late.  Hopefully you find the multiple quotes from the Devil's Due reviews relevant.  I felt it was important to illustrate just how frequently the critics employed what I considered to be an irrelevant attack.)

When I was growing up, Roger Ebert's reviews encouraged me to look below the surface and explore my own feelings about a film.  He knew how to give his opinions in a way that provoked discussion and introspection, not as a bludgeon to convince his audience that his opinion was an absolute truth.  More than that, he was fair when he deconstructed a film and itemized its shortcomings.  Was he always perfect? No.  When he really hated a film, you could sometimes sense his passion get away from him.  But he tried - and more often than not, he succeeded.

When I read the work of most current critics, I think of Roger Ebert and am reminded of a quote from Hamlet: "I shall not look upon his like again."

DEVIL'S DUE review

Let's get this out of the way for anyone not in the know who didn't read my interview this week with Radio Silence's Matt Bettinelli-Olpin: I have known the guys from Radio Silence for a long time now.  They're good friends of mine. We hang out rather frequently. I've helped them on a few of their shoots and we have spent many hours debating movies over the years.  So I wouldn't blame you if you want to keep those details in mind as you read my praise of their film, DEVIL'S DUE, opening today.

Then again, if I hated the film, I wouldn't lie about it. I simply would have side-stepped writing a review in the first place.

In an era where the success of found-footage horror like Paranormal Activity has lead to an explosion of found-footage projects, it would be easy to be weary of what many see as a gimmick.  In the wrong hands, that cinematic approach could be a cheat, a short-cut done to hide the lack of budget, resources and artistry on the part of the filmmakers.  Worse, it's leading to a number of projects being turned into found-footage movies just because producers are looking for quick and cheap ways to shoot a film.  A writer friend of mine tells of passing on a prospective rep when the manager kept pushing him to turn his scripts into found-footage stories, paying little mind to the fact that would not have been good for the story.

Fortunately, Radio Silence (directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, executive producer Chad Villella and executive producer/cinematographer/visual effects supervisor Justin Martinez) are smarter than most who take a stab at the genre.  In doing so, they not only refresh the genre, but also what could have been an uninspired retake at the concept of Rosemary's Baby.  (Lindsay Devlin wrote the script.)

Character development can be a hard thing to achieve in found footage (To date, Chronicle probabaly is the genre's best achievement on that front), and horror films in general often have trouble hitting those heights.  What was the last horror film where you really cared about the victims?  Right from the start, Devil's Due sets out to do what every script should - get the audience invested in its leads.

This would be a far lesser movie without the adorable chemistry of Zach Gilford and Allison Miller.  They play a young newlywed couple named Zach and Sam who end up in the wrong club during the final night of their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic.  Thanks to Zach's determination to capture much of their lives on film, the camera is left running through some of this and we catch glimpses of a satanic ritual the two are participants in while drugged and unconscious. Upon their return home, the two discover that Sam is pregnant.  While at first it's a happy moment, Sam's behavior becomes increasingly odd and disturbing.

The first fifteen minutes of the film lets us experience the two young lovers' wedding and honeymoon.  It's enough time to make them really feel like a couple.  They're cute in a way that doesn't feel forced and there's an intimacy to their reactions.  These two feel comfortable and goofy with each other and the genius of this is that it gives the horror something to threaten later on. You might find yourself rooting harder for a happy ending for Zach and Sam here than you have in a number of romantic comedies.

I can't help but contrast that with Paranormal Activity, where not only was it hard to buy the two leads as a couple, but the male lead was incredibly unsympathetic in how he ignored his girlfriend's terror and continued antagonizing the demon.  It didn't take long until you were just waiting to see this idiot push things too far and get maimed for it.

Zach is the complete opposite of that character.  Gilford brings a great everyman energy to the role and his empathic eyes sell both his deep love for Sam, but the total impotence he feels in the face of her strange behavior.  Without spoiling too much, Sam becomes more and more withdrawn even as she's prone to strange outbursts.  A nice touch is that it's hinted not all of her moodiness is the result of possession.  Sam hadn't planned on being pregnant for a while and one tense scene shows her frustrated with how this has upended all her life plans.  It's a credible way to increase the tension between her and Zach.


Miller does a great job playing the two sides to Sam.  Regular Sam is so goofy and adorable that you might develop a crush on her immediately.  As the transformation progresses and Sam becomes someone more unfamiliar to us, we're right there with Zach in wanting the old Sam back.

Radio Silence delivers on a number of scares, even while playing with familiar staples like nightvision and hidden cameras.  In most cases, our foreknowledge of how those tools are applied only increases the dread.  (When the nightvision comes out, you know it's for a reason. The only question is how long the suspense will be drawn out before the film plays its cards.)  There are a couple sequences here that are definitely in the mold of their V/H/S segment, but for my money, the most unsettling and uncomfortable sequence is one that has no supernatural aspects at all, and actually calls to mind a sequence in The Exorcist.

The film manages to avoid most of the found-footage pitfalls.  Since Zach never started filming with the intent to capture a ghost or haunting on film, we avoid the moments in all the Paranormal films where the characters apparently - and conveniently - miss playing back the footage with the most unsettling haunting footage (PA4 was especially sloppy in this regard.)  Still there is a point where Zach begins editing the footage and stumbles on to some shots he never expected to find.  This is one area where a little more follow-up might have been warranted.  Fortunately the film amps up the pace soon after this.

Aside from a welcome appearance from Sam Anderson, known to genre TV fans from Lost and Angel (and to TGIF fans from Perfect Strangers and Growing Pains), Gilford and Miller are left to carry most of the film on their own.  They rise to the challenge so well that there's little doubt they both have long careers ahead of them.  It's remarkable how much better a found footage film can be when the creators aren't afraid to cast familiar faces just because viewers won't believe it's "real."

A chat with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, co-director of Radio Silence's DEVIL'S DUE - Part 2

We continue our chat with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin of Radio Silence and co-director of DEVIL'S DUE.

Part 1 

I saw an early cut of this film and one of the things that struck me was how much time you spend building up the characters so that we care about them when things go horribly wrong. It's rare to get a horror film where the characters feel like real people, and surely some of that is because you don't often have the luxury of doing a purely character scene. Was it challenging to preserve that character depth as you went through the post-production process? 

We had to fight a little to keep in a couple scenes that were more character based, but for us that's what we love about all great movies. And it's one of the things that at the end of the day we could have easily cut down but Fox acknowledged that it's falling in love with Sam and Zach that makes the rest of the movie work, it's out linchpin. It's part of makes ROSEMARY'S BABY so incredibly special -- the amount of time you get to really understand Rosemary and who she truly is.

JOYRIDE, one of our collective favorites, does the same thing -- you get to fall in love with the Fuller brothers and laugh with them for a large part of the first act so that when Rusty Nail begins fucking with them, you hope them survive on a guttural level, not just a surface "I hope the hero lives" type thing, but a deeper feeling of "I truly like these people, they feel like my friends, I want to spend more time with them. And I hope some psycho doesn't kill them!"

It's pretty obvious of course, every great movie is about the characters, but unfortunately FF doesn't always lend itself to that type of storytelling but we really wanted to hold onto that from day one. Hopefully it comes through.

DEVIL'S DUE also marks the first time you four work on a script that you didn't generate yourselves. What was that process like?

It was a fun challenge but everyone involved was up for it and we really spent a lot of time molding the script into something that we felt was unique and ours, something we could go out and have fun with and tell a story that might have familiar themes but that ultimately we could make our own. It felt like a very malleable story that was constantly shifting as we tried to discover out the version we loved. We also had the extra job on constant camera justification. And after DEVIL'S DUE, V/H/S and the shorts, we've had way too many conversations and way too many headaches about why the camera is filming, but it's only because of those conversations and headaches that we're ultimately able to tell the story we want to tell in an authentic and intimate way.

Also, on set Zach Gilford and Allison Miller's (Zach and Sam) contributions were invaluable. We spoke at length during the entire process about camera motivation. Zach (who actually films a lot of the scenes his character is filming in the movie) was instrumental in helping us never lose sight of the camera as an extension of his character. We really functioned as a team throughout and that dialogue was always happening.

Let's talk about casting. Most of the time, found-footage films go for total unknowns or nearly-unknowns. While Zach Gilford and Allison Miller aren't quite household names, they've become fairly familiar faces on TV. The same could be said of Sam Anderson, who's recurred on everything from Growing Pains, to Angel to Lost. We don't usually see actors like that in found-footage because of the attempt to preserve the "this all actually happened" artifice. Was there any discussion of this? Why go in this direction? 

That was a very intentional choice during casting. Initially, we had talked about casting unknowns but with Zach (we're all huge fans of FNL) we decided he was the best for the role and shouldn't NOT get it because people might recognize him. We never wanted to pretend this is real. As soon as we settled on that we solidified the idea by casting Sam Anderson, who we loved on Lost.

Our thinking, and CHRONICLE did this wonderfully, was that we should focus on making an entertaining movie, not just a FF movie. That doesn't me we abandoned the rules of FF (we didn't) but it allowed us to be more creative with the story and the casting and everything in between.

For us, the movie should feel emotionally real, that's the ultimate goal -- audiences are way too smart to have the "this is real" FF wool pulled over their eyes anymore.

What were the most important things you guys learned from screening early cuts to an audience, both for this film specifically and for the process of shaping a film in general? 

Besides previews being nerve-wrecking part of the experience, they're actually pretty enlightening. Don't get me wrong, it's an awful experience but even if they go great, it's generally acknowledged that they don't ultimately mean much. Great movies get horrible numbers and vice versa.

But regardless of all that, I actually think they're incredibly helpful. An audience filled with strangers doesn't lie. They love it or hate it and either way we don't get to explain our choices or make excuses. They talk, we listen. But we got lucky, I think, because Fox let us take what was useful from the feedback and make those changes but none of it was do or die. Most of it was left up to us.

When you're sitting with an audience of strangers, there's a deep feeling in your gut when things aren't working and it sucks but it's much better during a preview than on opening night, right? And regardless of the feedback being negative or positive, those gut something-is-wrong-here moments are things you want to change. And ultimately, I think our movie is better for having gone through that process -- you get so close to the material that at a certain point it's impossible to see the big picture.

DEVIL'S DUE hits theaters this Friday!

A chat with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, co-director of Radio Silence's DEVIL'S DUE - Part 1

 About three years ago, I ran an interview with some good friends of mine who had made a name for themselves with web short released as the comedy troupe Chad, Matt and Rob.  You can find all three part of that interview here, here and here.

Since then the team has reorganized as the film-making collective Radio Silence, with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Chad Villella, and Justin Martinez.  Two years ago, they were among several filmmakers involved with the original V/H/S.  Many reviewers pointed to their segment, 10/31/98, as being the strongest of the bunch and most deserving of its placement as the film's closing segment.

Their first feature, DEVIL'S DUE, comes out this Friday.  It's already found a big fan in Eli Roth, who moderated a media event last month promoting the film.  The guys had some interesting things to say about the film and found footage in general, so if you're at all interested, you should check out the links below.

http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/73151/devils-due-preview-radio-silence-speaks-new-images#axzz2pvbOlv8o
http://collider.com/radio-silence-devils-due-interview/
http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news/344067-devils-due-what-you-need-to-know/#/slide/1

 In advance of the film's release, I arranged a two part interview with Bettinelli-Olpin, who along with Gillett, is credited as co-director. (Villella and Martinez are credited as executive producers, while Martinez is also credited as cinematographer and visual effects supervisor.)  In it we talk about found-footage in general, creative freedom and how one of the influences on the film was... The Notebook?

It's interesting that while you guys have done a fair number of "typical" narrative shorts for the web, the work that's made the most impact among a wider audience is all found footage. CHAD HATES ALIENS was your first viral short. MOUNTAIN DEVIL PRANK FAILS HORRIBLY was what got you V/H/S and your first foray into VFX, and then of course there's 10/31/98 from V/H/S. 

What are your thoughts on found footage in general and do you have any theories on why your work in it is so well-received? Is there something you're bringing to it that few others are? 

 There are obviously huge disadvantages when talking about FF, the most common ones are always "why are you filming" and too much "shaky cam." but there are also some advantages that we love -- mainly the intimacy you can create which in turn can heighten the humor and the horror. We love how intimate it can be, it's a real unique chance to bring the audience into the scene with the characters.

Since way back with CHAD HATES ALIENS, we've always focused on justifying the camera and making sure that it serves as an extension of the character and authentically have a place in the world of the story. But where the online pranks and V/H/S could literally be considered "found" footage, DEVIL'S DUE doesn't pretend to be footage that anyone has found or compiled, it's simply a story told through cameras that exists in that world. In that sense, it's a bit of an experiment that we were able to have fun with and as the character's lives spiral out of control we were able to mirror that journey visually by shifting to different (and hopefully creepier) POVs.

But all that said, our number on FF rule is always to be sure that the cameras in our story always function as an extension of character.

You guys have mentioned that Fox gave you guys a lot of creative freedom. Given that it's pretty normal for first-time feature directors to feel like their work is compromised, was that a surprise? Can you point to an instance where might not have expected the studio to go with an idea and they were won over? 

We wanted to create a sense of realism throughout so to allow for lots of improv within our scenes we had to meticulously structure the rest of the movie. And then try to hide that structure as much as possible. We're hoping to create an intentional feeling of free-flowing authenticity so from day one Fox agreed to let us go off the script a lot, as long as we got the scripted version first. But from there they were more of a creative partner than anything. We were given great and helpful ideas but never told "do this" or "do that" -- it was almost always left up to us to decide what should make the cut.

We found that a good conversation can go a long way, just talking through ideas as fully as possible whenever possible. And the people at Fox, Emma Watts and Steve Asbell especially, felt like true partners, not our bosses (even though they were, of course). At the end of the day, whatever felt like the best idea to serve the story would win out. And of course a few times that just meant trying all the different versions to see what truly fit the movie.

What do you think found footage skeptics will be most surprised by in this film? 

I wish I had a better answer but I feel like skeptics are always going to be skeptics and that's fine. We're not making a movie to change hearts and minds, we're just hoping to entertain people who want to be entertained and hopefully a little moved by Sam and Zach's plight.

We focused on their love story from day one. The first thing we said when we read the script was "let's hone in on their love story and then watch what happens when you throw a huge obstacle between them..." Not joking at all, we talked about THE NOTEBOOK quite a bit in terms of the horror of watching the person you love degenerate and being left helpless beyond continuing to love them unconditionally.

Read on in Part II!

Post #998 - A Shameless plug for my friends' new movie DEVIL'S DUE

My friends at Radio Silence have released a new trailer for their upcoming horror film DEVIL'S DUE, hitting theatres January 17th!





The film is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence. The other members of Radio Silence are Justin Martinez (Executive Producer, Cinematographer and Visual Effects Supervisor) and Chad Villella (Executive Producer.)

I think the guys have cooked up something pretty exciting. If you've seen their work in the final segment of the first V/H/S you know they're a clever group of filmmakers and from talking to them, I know they are really trying to deliver a horror film that makes you care about the character, played by Zach Gilford and Allison Miller. They star as a young couple whose pregnancy starts to take a dark and supernatural turn.

And how about that international poster? (Warning, probably not safe for work.)