Saturday 1 September 2018

SLENDER MAN

Starring: Joey King, Julia Goldani Telles, Jaz Sinclair
Writer: David Birke
Director: Sylvain White



Four teenage friends interested in the urban legend of the Slender Man decide to participate in a ritual which will supposedly summon him. A week later, one of them disappears and it becomes apparent that she wanted the Slender Man to take her, leaving the remaining three with the task of somehow getting her back...

To say Slender Man was a troubled production is probably something of an understatement. With its featured mythical character previously cited as the motivation for a particularly brutal stabbing committed by two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin, maybe it wasn't the greatest idea to push on with the movie it but here it is, sneaking out almost apologetically with few trailers, scant publicity and reports of a studio who had shown little or no support for the project.

To add to this, Screen Gems had insisted on a lower, more teen-friendly rating for the movie, the original script underwent radical changes and several scenes were removed over fear of viewer backlash had they been left in the completed product. Is there any way that the movie could somehow transcend all of these things and end up being surprisingly brilliant?

Absolutely not is the short answer.

Slender Man is a total mess from start to finish. The changes to the story are also writ large upon the screen as plot threads are picked up and then dropped unceremoniously, characters - even major ones - drift in and out of the proceedings seemingly at random and the tone is uncertain throughout. The dialogue is often dreadful, most of it being of the type that would only ever be said by teenagers in a movie. 

The powers of the Slender Man are dealt with somewhat inconsistently, setting him up as an entity who can bend reality and take whoever has invoked a connection with him but then having him not do that very thing on several occasions where he quite easily could have. He's unstoppable but this only seems to apply to those moments where the plot requires him to be.

Worse still, it's not scary in the slightest. The Slender Man himself may be an interesting creation but he doesn't generate the necessary dread and the film relies instead on a tiresome series of mechanical jump scares which even the most casual horror fan will consider hackneyed.

Visually it's one of the least inspiring fright flicks of late, its washed-out palette never catching the eye. Even the Slender Man's forest domain, with its tentacle-style branches, comes over as something that's been done before, many times, in much more impressive fashion. Elsewhere, the by-the-numbers camerawork doesn't immerse the viewer in the situation one little bit.

The performances are.....well, you know what? The performances are actually the best thing about this whole sorry business. Despite the utterly inane lines they're saddled with for most of the running time, Slender Man's young leads are all rather watchable, Julia Goldani Telles being the pick of the bunch.

Flat, suspenseless and remarkably dull, Slender Man makes 93 minutes feel like an eternity and for me it's the worst mainstream horror release in a very long time. Its talented cast deserves so much better. Chances of this film getting a sequel? Slender, I think.


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