Moth (2016) Review
Moth (2016) Review
For those of you unfamiliar with the Moth of the title, the Mothman is alleged to have appeared prior to a disaster occurring in West Virginia in the 1960’s. The Mothman itself does not attack and rip apart its victims, or indeed stalk them, so it came as a surprise to find that in directors Gergö Elekes and József Gallai’s movie the fluffy winged is meant to do just that. It makes the premise of this found-footage flick difficult to buy into, more so given that our lead characters are meant to be familiar with the myth and would know enough about the Mothman to question this.
Lecturer Thora (Lídia Szabó) travels from London, with volunteer student Adam (József Gallai, also writer and co-director), to investigate a number of recent Mothman sighting reports in Hungary. In typical found-footage tradition the mismatched twosome bicker endlessly, get lost (what? No Sat Nav?), lose their car and find themselves at the mercy of the very thing they were looking for.
Their apparent lack of preparation, their lack of common sense, Adam’s continual sulks and tendency to over react when bugger all has actually happened all add up to a very irritating movie. Spending eighty minutes in the company of this annoying twosome is not a choice you should make. There is a last minute twist that does tie up a number of the numerous loose ends dangling throughout but it comes too late to repair the damage its inflicted upon your senses by then.
Aside from the last moment reveal this is found-footage business as usual, a low-budget affair desperately trying to squeeze scares out of set-ups and locations that don’t hold any. Too much time is spent trying to build up two characters by having them natter about who they are to each other on camera. I couldn’t care about either of them and having to listen to their dull monologues and conversations had me reaching for my phone to check for text messages and Facebook updates rather than keep watching. Given the film is about the Mothman, a fascinating subject, they should have drummed up tension and scares by focusing/talking about him a bit more instead.
It’s unfortunate that Moth plays it’s best hand right at the end – although I can understand exactly why they left it to the end – why unfortunate? Until then Moth is unbearable, with variable sound, iffy acting, unconvincing location work, a hotel/motel that seems to have bugger all other people staying there, a cafe/restaurant that looks like someone tried to make it look like one at the last minute and a guy dressed up as the Mothman, where again the makers fail to get things right. Just pointing a camera at locations in the hope the viewer would find them eerie is insulting, there has to be something more substantial for someone to get scared and for a movie to work it has to be much better than this.
