To be honest, this movie baffled me. Is it absolutely terrible? No. Did it have potential? Yes. But somehow all of it amounted to only this bizarre mess of a film. Let me put something out there first: "We Are Still Here" clocks in at one hour and 17 minutes. At the end I expected there to be 20 more minutes of movie left. The whole thing felt rushed, and the ending was...abrupt, to say the least.
The story follows a couple who move into a new house hoping to move past the death of their son. This is a time-tested plot. However, "We Are Still Here" proceeds to give us almost no information about the son and no time to feel the weight of his parent's grief. It merely establishes that his mother can "feel his presence" in the house before embarking on a series of cheap scares. There are several very sudden character deaths that in a better movie would seem bold. Here they just seem lazy. There is precisely one very creepy moment that would have been perfect if it hadn't immediately transitioned to a series of jump scares (that it was also intercut with Lisa Marie's "acting" didn't help).
The later scenes involve almost cartoonish amounts of gore. If the movie was an intentional horror-comedy this would have been fine. The first 3/4 of the movie seemed to be going for straight horror, though, so I didn't know what to make of it. I could talk about the bad writing and jarringly terrible lighting as well, but what would be the point? It ultimately felt like a short film stretched beyond its limit. The concept would have worked great in a tight 15-20 minutes, where movies can get away with the spareness and ambiguity that "We Are Still Here" features. As it is, though, it feels like a movie that ran out of budget and ideas long before it was truly finished.
The story follows a couple who move into a new house hoping to move past the death of their son. This is a time-tested plot. However, "We Are Still Here" proceeds to give us almost no information about the son and no time to feel the weight of his parent's grief. It merely establishes that his mother can "feel his presence" in the house before embarking on a series of cheap scares. There are several very sudden character deaths that in a better movie would seem bold. Here they just seem lazy. There is precisely one very creepy moment that would have been perfect if it hadn't immediately transitioned to a series of jump scares (that it was also intercut with Lisa Marie's "acting" didn't help).
The later scenes involve almost cartoonish amounts of gore. If the movie was an intentional horror-comedy this would have been fine. The first 3/4 of the movie seemed to be going for straight horror, though, so I didn't know what to make of it. I could talk about the bad writing and jarringly terrible lighting as well, but what would be the point? It ultimately felt like a short film stretched beyond its limit. The concept would have worked great in a tight 15-20 minutes, where movies can get away with the spareness and ambiguity that "We Are Still Here" features. As it is, though, it feels like a movie that ran out of budget and ideas long before it was truly finished.