★★★★
Paul Gandersman and Peter S. Hall deliver the best found-footage mystery in years – smart, tense, and quietly gripping.
The opening stretch of Man Finds Tape is terrific. It has that rare feeling of unpredictability, where a film seems genuinely capable of going anywhere. Lynn Page, a documentarian, is pulled back to her Texas hometown after her brother Lucas – a small-time YouTuber whose channel, also called Man Finds Tape, once chased local myths – claims to have uncovered surveillance footage of a hit and run killing that many saw but somehow nobody remembers. When those caught in the footage are shown the death played back, they don’t get a chance to comment – they simply fall unconscious immediately.
But Lucas has a shadow hanging over him – he’d previously claimed to found a hidden childhood video tape of himself sleeping at night, watched by a shadowy figure. His online investigations into that tape led him to make accusations against a local preacher that he later had to walk back in disgrace. This new investigation may be as much for clicks or redemption as it is for the truth. But as he ropes in his sister it leads into something deeply strange: a tale of fugue states, brainwashing, conspiracy, and maybe, just maybe, cosmic horror.
Gandersman and Hall make strong, confident choices, moving between formats – old DV camcorders, YouTube, CCTV – without breaking the flow or disrupting the sinister energy of the film. Each shift in texture adds tension, and the film’s best moments come from that friction between formats, where you’re not quite sure what it is you’re really seeing. The pacing is patient, but pressing; scenes linger just long enough to feel ominous and the creepy footage is loaded with dread.
A lot of found footage movie flounder when it comes to the acting – the format is very unforgiving of non-naturalistic performances. But Man Finds Tape has a great cast; in particular, John Gholson is superbly sinister as the unctuous televangelist Endicott Carr (“two ts, two rs”), and the ever-dependable Graham Skipper is a standout as hapless local Winston Boon.
As the mystery starts to resolve the energy drops a notch; the revelations around the town’s secrets, when they come, are enjoyably squirmy but less compelling than the uncertainty that came before it. Yet the believably fractious sibling dynamic proves a strong emotional core throughout, the film’s command of craft is far above most found-footage efforts, and the story remains unpredictable right up to the closing credits.
Man Finds Tape proves the old found footage magic still works. It’s lean, atmospheric, and grounded in character rather than gimmick. Even if it never quite hits those eerie, mysterious first-act highs again, it keeps its grip to the end. This is the best found-footage horror mystery in years – playful, eerie, and chilling.
Man Finds Tape played at Celluloid Screams, and is released in the US in theaters and on demand on December 5.
Whitlock&Pope 