★★★
Myanmar’s first found footage horror is a woodland chiller whose camera glasses solve the subgenre’s oldest problem (“why are they still filming?”) as a gang of friends encounter a witch, a curse, and a very bad time down at the cabin.
Found footage advances by whatever the audience happens to be holding. The camcorder gave us The Blair Witch Project, the phone gave us most of the 2010s, and Arkar Soe Oo’s The Last Footage is the first film I have seen to hitch itself to the new wave of camera-enabled glasses. It does nothing with them beyond furnishing a reason to be filming at all times, though that may be the whole benefit. The structural nuisance of the form has always been why anyone keeps recording, and eyewear disposes of it at a stroke. The brand is enunciated clearly enough that I shan’t repeat it here.
Soe Oo, whose 2023 thriller Their House was a domestic hit, writes, directs, edits, produces and stars as Aung Khant, a tech-obsessed young man who buys the glasses and carries them out to an abandoned rubber plantation one of the group has inherited, deep in cursed Wingabar Forest. The film has a witch, a monster and a supernatural curse, but the least plausible thing in it is that nobody ever looks into the lens and objects. Not one of them says “are you filming me with your Pervert Glasses? Please don’t.”
Preceding all this is an anthology of clips recorded by other wearers, which doubles as a demonstration of what the eyewear can do, and it is deeply uninteresting. The last of them turns to horror, but its lore is never made clear, the episode is never returned to, and the result is dull rather than frightening. A title card then announces that what follows is – in true Blair Witch fashion – the final footage recovered from a group who went missing in the woods.
That feature opens with a getting-to-know-you first act which runs slightly long and succeeded chiefly in making me dislike everyone – except perhaps the rock chick. But once the group is under the trees things start to get enjoyably creepy. Soe Oo draws genuine unease from the failing light and the near-real-time structure, even if everyone seems markedly under-worried when a literal child goes missing. This stretch introduces the best character, a cackling witch woman of the woods played with considerable relish by Mo Khum, and the best absurd gag: the boy’s toy dinosaur, named with some ceremony “Brad Pitt”, which allows him to later complain sadly that Brad Pitt has been left behind on the bus.
The climax is a somewhat enjoyable sub-Evil Dead farrago of running and screaming in which Aung Khant’s function is to look at things. With violence going on around him he can only stand and watch, which is a peculiar sort of passivity on which to build a climax.
I have a weakness for woodland found footage, and even the subpar entries summon the spectre of The Blair Witch Project, on which this one has some claim, having brought a witch of its own. Myanmar’s genre cinema circulates largely on VCDs and online and has been close to invisible abroad. This is its first found-footage horror, and I hope it’s the first of many more. After all, horror is the universal language.
The Last Footage played at the Fantasia film festival in Montreal.