Review: Bethany (2017)

[Mark R. Leeper]

BETHANY
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

CAPSULE: This is a film of psychological and paranormal
horror. A woman who had a painful childhood years
before and who suffers from scary visions returns to
live in the house she grew up in. She starts having
increasingly violent hallucinations. While the film is
tightly and tensely shot with some disturbing imagery,
the script by actor Zack Ward and by James Cullen
Bressack is not up to James Cullen Bressack's directing.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10

Claire (Stefanie Estes) had a particularly painful childhood
dominated by her self-obsessed mother and with few friends. Her
best friends were stuffed animals, some dolls, and her imaginary
friend Bethany. She lived years in a big, dark, deadening house.
Claire's mother treated her as a possession. What happiness she
had was playing with Bethany. But Claire broke free of her mother
and of the house when Claire was eighteen.

In the following years Claire married Aaron (Zack Ward). She
buried her past until her mother died. Claire inherited her
childhood home and decides to try to forget the past and return to
living in the old house. When she feels depressed, which happens
increasingly often, she can talk about it with the imaginary
Bethany who still lives or perhaps lives again in the walls of the
house. Bethany takes the form of whispers coming from the walls.
But this sort of friendship does not always work as fans of horror
film know. Either Bethany or Claire has taken to arranging and
causing accidents for Claire. Most fans of the horror film will
have seen a lot of the ideas and mechanisms previously appearing in
other films. For example this film is being released just two
weeks after Ed Gass-Donnelly's horror film LAVENDER, a film with
which it has many plot parallels.

Bressack knows how to shoot the film without a reliance on false
jump scenes or other "turn the crank" ways to get a reaction from
the audience. Bressack as director knows better than squander his
viewers' trust. He does have an eye for mood and color. While
the real world shown in naturalistic color, the hallucinations are
often reduced to heavy use of primary colors to give a dreamlike
effect. In general the film is well executed, but just lacks the
creativity it needed from Bressack the writer to set itself apart
from so many similar nightmare fests. I rate it a high +1 on the -
4 to +4 scale or 6/10.

BETHANY will be released to theaters and On Demand on April 7.

Film Credits:
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4516352/combined>

What others are saying:
<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bethany>


Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 2017 Mark R. Leeper