Untold Review: Generic Horror That Doesn’t Scare

Untold Review: Celebrated journalist Vivian Vera finds herself haunted by vengeful spirits when her fabricated reports on “Cement Massacre” come back to haunt her. With no other option but to face the consequences, will Vivian be able to overcome them or succumb to them?

The film has a runtime of 107 minutes.

Untold Review

The entire premise of the Filipino film Untold hinges on journalist Vivian Vera’s exploration of her past and being haunted by it. It’s a horror film, so you see a lot of spirits and ghosts associated with her, including a shoddy coverage of a “Cement Massacre”, and we wait to see what it has brought forth to incite the ire of the dead. The film, unfortunately, feels extremely boring because nothing of note truly happens throughout the runtime, just Vivian dreaming of ghosts holding her from different angles.

The problem, I think, lies in the fact that the storyline hinges on us liking Vivian enough to feel shocked in her place. She’s being haunted by her past, but the audience doesn’t feel that connection to her because her character feels hollow and disingenuous. For a big chunk of the runtime, we hardly know anything about her, and thus, you don’t care about the jumpscares that plague her constantly. She’s also not a good person in general, so that makes it even harder for us to connect with her.

On the other hand, the horror elements are also quite uninteresting as most of them happen in dream sequences and are traditional, boring jumpscares. That, in itself, isn’t always the problem, but with this film, it makes the runtime extremely slow and boring because you wait for the terror to wash over you, but it just never does. However, I will be honest, I find jumpscares to be annoying because they take away the tension in a scene and leave you feeling immense disappointment afterwards.

Of course, the problem here is also that nothing truly happens to Vivian throughout. While sure, she gets manhandled by spirits constantly, they supposedly don’t actually like harming the human they are haunting for some odd reason. It’s such a generic, cliché concept that makes no sense if you really think about it. Thus, there are no real stakes here for us to feel terrified about.

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The storyline drags on with this one hope of solving the “why” question, and that, too, is absolutely disappointing. The film gives us a complete explanation in the last half and dumps it all as an exposition. It’s just so disappointing because you expect a crescendo that leaves you spellbound, but nothing of the sort happens. I found myself completely unimmersed in the storyline, waiting for something to happen that never truly does.

Final Thoughts

Untold is a film that is extremely generic and doesn’t try to reinvent the genre in any way. It tries to churn out the same old story once again, hoping to elicit some new fears, but, as the audience, it’s never terrifying to be able to (correctly) guess where the movie is going. The performances are fine, but a horror film needs to terrifying us and that’s not something that we get here.

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