PARANORMAL ACTIVITY - Theatrical review

"Paranormal Activity" benefits from a very effective set-up; in this case, a specific camera set-up.

The story in brief: Katie (Katie Featherston) believes she is being haunted by a demon. Her boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) wants to capture the evidence on film.

He sets the camera on a tripod and points it at their bed as they sleep. He uses a wide-angle that frames the bed on the right half of the screen, and the open door to the hallway on the left, crowded into the upper corner. This deceptively simple composition provides the energy that powers the movie's most effective scenes.

Cinema, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Anyone familiar with the moving image knows that this empty (negative) space is begging to be filled. At any moment. And, seeing as we've just talked about demons, probably by something rather nasty. As the camera's time code scrolls by at elapsed speed through the night and then slows down to real time, we just know that something in that general area of the frame is going to happen.

Writer/director Oren Peli doles out the something with an eye dropper. On Night #1 (many of the nights are marked by number) we hear a clatter of keys dropping off the downstairs table. The next night, the bedroom door closes halfway and then re-opens. Later, the patter of feet and maybe, just maybe, a whispering voice. All out in the hallway which we can just barely see through the door and, night by night, creeping just a bit closer to that looming threshold…

Fortunately, Peli doesn't play coy with the story. Katie is sure from the very start that she's being stalked by a demon. In fact, she thinks it's been with her since childhood (maybe she's related to that unbearable kid from "Paranormal State") and a psychic (Mark Friedrichs) confirms her suspicions. Leaving the house won't help. It is she that the demon wants, a neat piece of plotting which prevents a frustrated audience from asking "Why don't you morons just move out?"

Were we speaking of morons? Ah yes, let's talk about Micah the pseudo-skeptic and obsessive video documentarian. He thinks he's smart, but so do most dumb people. His skepticism is soon quelled but even once he believes in Katie's creepy friend, instead of reacting with fear or even caution he just seems to find it kinda cool and pretty funny. He repeatedly taunts the demon despite the warnings of the psychic and pleading from Katie. He might as well be wearing a "Drag Me to Hell" t-shirt.

Micah aside, the film has a lot going for it. Peli milks that clever bedroom set-up for all it's worth… which last about 40 minutes. After creating some genuine tension and even a few scares with off-screen noise, Peli is confronted with a dilemma. He can't keep teasing the audience with grunts and thumps, but if he escalates the action he risks undermining the delicate balance has succeeded up until that point.

It's quite a conundrum, and Peli is unable to resolve it. The more the film amps up the action, the more tangible the manifestations get, the less scary and involving the movie becomes. We've already established beyond any shadow of a doubt that there's a demon, so what's so frightening about seeing its powdery footprints or its shadow more than an hour into the movie? Inevitably the film winds up in generic horror territory with the shrieking and the thrashing and the "Oh my Gods!" I found the final scene to be inadvertently hilarious but let the record show that the row of people seated behind me were echoing the "Oh my Gods!" much like the soiled-undies viewers in the film's now famous online trailer.

The movie also raises some nagging questions. Exactly how do these two lovebirds keep falling asleep so easily when they know there's a freaking demon haunting them? Why does Micah need to keep proving that there's a demon when he's already proven it multiple times and even admitted that he believes it? (Answer: Because we have to fill out 90 minutes of screen time.) And most perplexing of all, how did he end up with such a hot girlfriend?

Peli gets some mileage from toying with genre tropes, particularly the archetypical "expert" who is always there to provide specialized advice and assistance ("Don't go into the light!") but he just doesn't have enough ideas to sustain a feature-length running time. This could have been a nifty short film, but it appears that the feature-stretch has been more than worth the effort considering the film's box office success even before this week's wide release.

One thing the film proves is how effective a tripod can be even in these pseudo-documentary style films. That fixed wide-angle shot of a quiet bedroom provides more nervous energy, more queasy-gut, than all of the jerky hand-held close-up shots in the whole movie. Here's hoping that more of today's younger horror filmmakers heed the lesson.

There's a lot to like here. Just not enough. Cool end credits though.