Alice Fades Away (VOD) – Movie Review
The days of dark, blood-splattered horror are long gone. More and more moviemakers seem to realize that things don’t need to be gritty and overflowing with jumpscares to be frightening, and an erupting genre of daylight-filled horror movies is popping up. Alice Fades Away toes the line between horror and thriller, filling the watcher with a healthy dose of suspense in the way director Ryan Bliss does best.
Alice Fades Away is brought in a non-chronological fashion, giving us small pieces of a puzzle we gradually fit together to figure out the bigger pictures. Alice (Ashley Shelton) is a clearly traumatized woman on the run from her abusive husband (Tommy Beardmore). She finds refuge on an isolated farm owned by the strangely enigmatic Bishop (Jay Potter) and the other people he has taken under his wing for various reasons. As we learn what exactly Alice is running from through flashbacks and her growing closeness to the people around her, we also learn that some past horrors might not be so easily left behind her. What ensues is almost a psychological game of cat-and-mouse, with all the expected results.
The story does not move along the way most horror movies do, being a lot more slow-paced in the way it plays out. This has to do with a lot of context being provided out of order, keeping you guessing. It almost feels impossible to know what will happen next and some scenes won’t make perfect sense until later in the movie. While it’s an interesting approach and certainly shows a lot of skill on the director’s part – not to mention being the perfect way to heap up the tension – it does have its drawbacks. Alice Fades Away moves almost too slow at times, drawing out certain scenes longer than necessary. For a movie that already has a relatively short run length, it’s a bit disappointing to feel like it’s playing for extra time. This is an easy thing to forgive however when the story really draws you in from beginning to end.
The aforementioned is something we can attribute to the great performances of the actors. The acting in this movie is really understated, some might even call it awkward or stilted at first. But it won’t take long to realize why the lowkey approach works, and when things start to escalate, so do the performances, getting tenser with the rising stakes of the movie. It really provides for an interesting watch.
Seeing as we watched a digital version of the movie, no extras were provided yet. A potential DVD release would stand perfectly on its own without additional content, though movies like this make the watcher curious about the deleted scenes that might have been altered or cut out of the movie in the progress of making it. It would be great to see if those could be included as bonus material.
Conclusion
Alice Fades Away is not the typical horror experience, instead playing with the viewer’s inherent fear of being on the run. Unable to escape your past and those that want to hurt you is a horrible thought, made even worse by your incapability to protect those you want to protect. With amazing cinematography and great acting in all departments, this movie is a great watch for people who love to be kept on the edge of their seats.
Alice Fades Away (VOD) - Movie Review,
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