Tenebris is a found footage horror film told entirely through Ring doorbell camera footage.
Plot
A grieving man returns to his hometown to sort through his late mother’s belongings, only to become consumed by a brutal murder captured on his Ring camera.
Good Points
- The doorbell camera idea – I was expecting the fixed camera to become irritating pretty quickly, but having such a limited view worked alright up to a point.
- It creates some decent tension – you know the camera can’t simply turn around and show you what’s happening, so there are quite a few moments where you’re staring at one part of the screen while wondering what the hell is happening just out of view.
- The night-time footage is creepy – Watching an otherwise ordinary suburban street through a grainy security camera at night is actually quite eerie.
- It doesn’t need loads of effects – The film gets a good amount out of people appearing, disappearing and moving around within that tiny field of view rather than throwing expensive-looking horror nonsense at you.
- The format gives it its own identity – This isn’t just normal found footage with somebody carrying a camera around, with the fixed viewpoint being the whole gimmick, and thankfully the film actually uses it well.
- The runtime helps – at around 50 minutes, it doesn’t hang around forever trying to convince you that a single doorbell camera can sustain a two-hour film.
Bad Points
- The gimmick can get repetitive – Once you’ve seen the same doorway and street from the same angle for a while, there isn’t exactly a huge amount of visual variety.
- Some scenes feel stretched – There are moments where I was thinking, “Right, we get it,” and waiting for something to actually happen.
- The fixed camera limits the horror – It works brilliantly when something is just outside the frame, but it also means the film occasionally has to rely on people coming into shot in fairly convenient ways.
- Relies on the novelty – there are some good moments, but a few of them feel like they’re relying more on the novelty of the setup than genuinely unsettling you.
Final Verdict on Tenebris
I thought Tenebris was a pretty interesting experiment with the found footage format, mainly because it takes one of those things we normally see for a few seconds in horror films – the doorbell camera – and decides that’s going to be the entire movie, and it worked more often than it doesn’t.
The restricted viewpoint is both the best thing about the film and its biggest problem though, as when something is happening just outside the camera’s view, it creates a really nice bit of tension because you’re forced to sit there looking at the same screen and wondering what you’re missing.
But when nothing much is happening, though, you’re basically sitting there looking at the same screen waiting for someone to walk into it, but I liked the fact that the filmmakers committed to the idea rather than constantly finding excuses to break the format, which gives Tenebris a strange, almost voyeuristic quality.
It isn’t consistently trying to be scary, and I think some scenes could have been tighter, but the 50-minute runtime was a good choice, and for found footage fans who like films that mess around with the format, Tenebris is definitely worth a look.
It’s a simple idea, but at least it’s doing something with it rather than just sticking a shaky camera in someone’s hand and hoping for the best.
Leave a Reply