Hollow

I'm a really big fan of movies that have psychological drama and human drama. This movie has both and goes above and beyond. As both a psychological horror and a human drama, the relies a lot on viewers believing the cast. However, the actors were superb and the dialogue was dramatic, natural, and genuine. The camera perspective was spectacular. The movie really successfully shows the friends go through a horrifying narrative that haunts your dreams. What I really love about the movie is that it has a wonderful balance of suspense and surprise. A lot of horror movies rely on surprising you with this gag and that gag but this movie deliberately uses enough suspense to draw you in so that you are emotionally invested with the characters.

The first thing that strikes you about the piece is that it's filmed entirely from the perspective of a hand-held camera. It's a bold move, one which has worked well for the likes of Cloverfield, and certainly feels like the perfect way to convey Hollow's narrative. Depicting two couples embarking on a weekend trip to the countryside, the story takes a sinister turn, embellished with ominous folklore and the complex character dynamics of the characters. As both a psychological horror and a character drama, the piece hinges strongly on the believability of the cast. With the combination of superb acting and sublime dialogue, along with the video camera perspective too, Hollow absolutely excels in portraying this group of friends in a chilling and engrossing narrative that's guaranteed to unnerve you. It takes a fair amount for something to scare me (I blame this relative immunity on my father for introducing me to the Alien films when I was eight! Having said that, though, I was terrified of the goblins in Noddy when I was four...). But this film created a lurking sense of uneasiness throughout, a sense that grew more and more prominent as it progressed. And the ending was absolutely terrifying! It's exactly that kind of tantalizing horror that I enjoy – the fear of knowing that something's going to happen any minute now, but it just keeps maliciously not happening. There's no release from that impending fear, and the tension continues to mount...

The sooner the writers of Hollow find their plot and storyline, would they be so good as to post them online so that viewers can get closure ? Whilst the film starts off very well, following the tried and tested found footage methodology, character development falls short, and we are left with very little empathy towards the main cast. Undoubtedly some movies get away with this, but in a film that only really has 4 actors, any lack of warmth towards the cast, immediately puts you on edge, struggling to get to grips with their interactions and as a result, the story. Filming POV like this, it is, granted, difficult at times to pull through protagonist's emotions and demeanours, but to completely overlook this for an entire 90 minutes is borderline criminal. Usually, when main leads get killed off, the viewer will experience some sort of emotion - relief, sadness, guilt or even at times, joy - but towards the end of this film, even though we know they are going to die, their deaths come as a void of nothingness and to coin a phrase, meh. The viewer has to dig deep to try and work out the sub plots embedded in this, those sub plots are tenuous and flimsy to say the least, and it's more by accident than design, that we get to a relatively acceptable conclusion. If the writers were trying to be clever, then sorry, there's a massive difference between clever and subtle, or more appropriately, stupid and contrived. The ending, and I'm surmising at this point, was more to do with love rejected, and nonacceptance at the new dynamics of a relationship, leading to suicide, and whilst that subject in itself is not one to be laughed at, the way the writers and director went about putting the message across, is, I'm sorry to say, laughable. That angle of the story is somewhat clear, however as mentioned previously, the varying sub plots and character interaction detract from what in essence, should have been a very strong, very clear message. This is not a movie you will enjoy watching, which is a pity, because the premise of it, could have given us a strong film. 3/10

Four pretty young things decide to spend the weekend together out in a fairly desolate part of Suffolk. While there, they discover a sinister tree, and some legends about the tree – as well as the fact that many couples have hung themselves from those ancient branches. The actors are all superb. I really can't praise them enough – the characters are all rounded, and their relationships believable. Some of the scenes are fairly long, too, and the actors manage to keep the realism and the tension throughout. Despite obvious budget restraints, the film is very stylish (in a good way). There has clearly been a lot of though given to making a standard 'camcorder footage' film look good, while remaining natural. In fact, this is undoubtedly the most natural 'found footage' film that I've seen. What impressed me the most about HOLLOW, however, was just how old-school it is. The horror doesn't come from violence and gore, or from CGI creations, but from our fear of the unknown. A great deal of the screen is dark for huge portions of the film – we can't see what may be out there. HOLLOW deserves to be seen as much more than a basic BLAIR WITCH knock-off. For a first feature, I'm very impressed. There is a lot of talent on display here.

In my ten years of IMDb activity, I have never come across a movie with such laughably fake 'reviews'. I perfectly understand how tastes vary and that one person's hidden gem can be another's stinking turd. But 'Hollow' is, by any objective criteria, pure garbage. The favorable reviews posted here can not possibly be genuine. The movie could have been enjoyably average: a mildly interesting idea squeezed into the found-footage formula of "The Blair Witch Project". It's problem lies squarely with its characters. In real life, panicky people annoy me. You know the type I mean: blubbering and hyperventilating and getting all mindlessly hysterical. I just want to slap them and tell them to grow a spine. My annoyance becomes outright anger when such people are made the protagonists of a movie. And don't tell me it's "realism": millions of people the world over deal with crazy s**t every year without curling up in a ball and begging for death. Every character in "Hollow" runs around screaming and crying, whining and bickering, doing absolutely nothing to help themselves or each other. Every one of them is unbelievably selfish and displays the intelligence of a mildly retarded pre-schooler. They're just so pathetic it's impossible to feel any sympathy, still less empathy. I'm at a loss to understand why movies are made about such people. Why am I supposed to care what happens to them? Why should I bother watching? Complete waste of time: very tough to sit through.

Trailer—Hollow

Hollow