Movie Review: The Pact

by | Jul 7, 2012 | Reviews | 0 comments

Most families, somewhere along the bloodline, hold deep, dark, often traumatizing secrets. Nicholas McCarthy’s film The Pact explores one family’s struggle with the proverbial skeletons in the closet, though the skeletons shared by these relations are much darker than most viewers could ever imagine.  Returning to her childhood home following the death of the mother she loathes, Annie (Caity Lotz) realizes that the terror of her abusive childhood may not be all the horror for which her bloodline is responsible.  As Annie slowly tries to unravel the web that binds her family secrets, she enlists the help of a cynical cop (Casper Van Dien) and a dedicated medium Stevie (Haley Hudson). To reveal the nature of what Annie unearths would give too much of the plot away, but it involves a hidden room, a long-lost uncle, and ambiguous ending that will leave the audience scratching their heads—making this something that is not seen as often as this critic would like:  a thinking horror movie.

The Pact has some very good points, including first-rate acting (not often seen in such a low budget film), genuine scares—especially the scene where Annie is skyping, and the aforementioned concept of thinking in a genre often flooded with mindless sex and/or gore.  However, the film also contains several formulaic horror scenes, which diminishes its originality just a bit.  Furthermore, the film’s initial concept was in the form of a short, which can be glimpsed in a few scenes that seem stretched to fill in the minutes. Despite these few glitches, the film still manages to surprise, and more importantly with this genre, to actually produce a chilling scare.  And while the scares may not be not be all that graphic, violent or bloody, they hold the promise to make the viewer come away from the film not only deliberating the ending, but also reflecting on his/her own family secrets, wondering just how sinister the skeletons in the ancestral closet really are.