Neverlake (2014)

Absolutely Fantastic

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Sometimes, someone has a pretty nice idea that depending on right, smart and carefully planned execution has the potential to become a great film. Neverlake is, in my opinion, an example of how a wanting execution spoils this kind of a nice idea. After watching it I couldn't help but feeling bad for whomever was responsible for the general plot, as it felt to me like showing such a story the right way could have been great, while showing it in this way simply didn't do it justice.As the trailers and plot summaries have already told you, Neverlake tells the story of a teenage girl going to visit her father in Italy. There, she is confronted by both his half colleague half lover (showing a bluntly exaggerated interest in her physical health) and a party of children of different ages each suffering from some sort of physical ailment of deformity. In addition, the storyline is saturated with hints alluding to something supernatural haunting the nearby lake. Enough to make one curious and follow the plot closely, but also enough to frustrate a viewer, because okay, we get it, stop wasting screen time with another unnecessary hint, that's not how you set up a plot twist.And then? Comes the plot twist, which is nefarious and grim, but has extremely little to do with the aforementioned redundant hints. Following the initial shock I couldn't help but wonder why the heck I was shown all these hints only to lead to such a twist. Either the hints or the twist should not have been used, it almost feels like the creators couldn't come up with enough relevant scenes.After all this criticism anyone reading could think that I didn't enjoy Neverlake, but I actually did. The fine acting and intriguing characters along with a story that could have been better but isn't all bad were seemingly enough to create a rewarding Horror experience. I'm merely saying one should lower their expectations in advance if they wish to enjoy this film, and not wait for anything spectacular or overly impressive. An average story in an average film.

And that's all the explanation you're gonna get about this hodgepodge of a movie. It's a story about a teenage girl going to visit her estranged father or a surprise vacation in the middle of a school year only to get entangled in a organ harvesting fiasco, where she gets to meet a lot of ghosts her age. Because, Lake.To understand the movie better, these a a few stuff you have to keep in mind: 1. Teenagers are the most trusting and unsuspecting bunch of the lot. a) Somehow, being raised by her grandma on her mother's side, Jenny knows nothing about her dead mom, which is the most usual thing on earth. Grandma dislikes Dad, Jenny's meeting stepmom for the first time (apparently) and by the look of it she's never even heard about her, she's happy happy about it though (good on her) and she takes dubious handful of "vitamin" pills everyday her Dad prescribed from the moment she arrives. Without asking why. Without asking how he could've known her health situations without even checking her once. Because, Lake (you need strength for hiking). That hiking with Dad never happens but oh well, we'll continue taking the pills. Teenagers are trusting like that.b) She meets a strange child by the Lake, eyes bandaged up, never gets curious, takes her to a dilapidated building where she meets more of them, comes back to them everyday to read them poems and stories, no adults around ("make sure you're not seen by the adults, they are evil!"), never asks how they live on their own 'cause that's obviously a very normal setting of things. c) The situation at home gets weird, Dad locks himself in his office for hours or going over to the nearby town overnight, stepmom acting sinister though never forgetting to give her pills, she sees them arguing over some curious hush hush topic through crack of the door, Dad being generally douchy by not taking her anywhere apart from one errand to a shop and she never questions why he called her over in the first place. Vacation, yay, only she's not happy and throws a token tantrum once. still no questions, though.d) Wakes up in an operating room: lost expression, learns had had an operation for a dubious "sudden adrenaline gland dysfunction": promptly back to her happy self. Doesn't matter that she was a healthy young woman all her life. What operation? What did they do to her? This doesn't look like a hospital! Why is her abdomen paining? Blegh, questions are for dummies. "I'm okay with "Operations" but can we go get an ice cream later?!" 2. Medicine? Works sometimes. Paranormal cures? Well, work sometimes as well. Ta-Daa! We bring you Paramedical Science, guaranteed to work without a glitch through all those nooks in your body medicine and voodoo cannot reach. Got your organs and tendons turning into bones due to over-calcification? We replace the affected organ from a healthy (unwilling) donor but also make sure to carve it out in stone and throw in the middle of the lake. See, we're not sure which one works but if you pull those stone figures out of water, your new organs will turn into stone. Why? Because, Power of the Laaake! Could we have just thrown stone carvings of organs into the lake to cure you then, since that part seems to trump the other? I guess, but that wouldn't make this an interesting movie. 3. When you regain consciousness right before a multiple organ harvest from you and the bad guys are right in the next room with door ajar, don't forget to go back to your room upstairs and pull on a jeans. 'Cause you might need a drink after you've saved your own life and saved the day and pubs look down upon hospital scrub as the dress code.4. Octopus Medusa Lady living in the lake is a good woman, though she may be blind. Peter needs to tell her what's happening in the lake right under her nose before she comes to your rescue. Good thing she has a hotline to the cops though, they'll arrive right on cue to arrest the stepmom (for what?) while you're still searching inside the dilapidated house after killing your dad and Stepsister.5. It's heroic to kill your disabled stepsister who was ecstatic on learning she has a sister. Bringing the stone figures out of the lake wouldn't get back your kidney or risk your other organs now that Dad is dead but where's the fun if you don't get to kill anyone innocent?6. Shelly's poetry makes everything sound polished. Even repeated rants about "sensitive plants" and organs. Promise.All in all, I have no clue to what I just watched. Hopefully, armed with these hints you will. Good luck!

I believe it was Aristotle who claimed that in fiction the impossible works better than the improbable. In other words, a horror movie with Etruscan ghosts haunting a Tuscan lake? I'm along for the ride. A guy managing to keep many people in captivity for years, successfully performing complex surgical procedures on them and getting rid of the corpses, all without anyone ever noticing? And not somewhere in the Gobi desert, but in one of the most densely populated European countries, to boot? I'm not buying it. And I will mention neither his demented motivations nor a spoiler - his connection with the victims - which make the premise even more ridiculous.Neverlake suffers from a case of overplotting. Either you go with the supernatural storyline or with the "medical experiments/abductions" cases: pick one and run with it. The two don't glue together well, and structure gets wonky; any horror movie where a medusa-like monster is there merely for a cameo, where a surgeon performs ludicrously difficult operations and follows them up with esoteric rituals, or where the protagonist first has to throw some relics in a lake to appease phantoms and then to recover other relics from the same lake to appease other phantoms... well, it should probably rethink its storytelling choices.5/10

I was impressed with the first 5 minutes or so, and that kept me around through this entire movie, however though it was a decent ghost story, there are a lot of really boring moments in it. I felt over all that the first half of the movie could have been titled "The blind leading the ignorant" and that would have been enough to just move past the whole getting to know the children stage. The main theme hidden under the ghost story, and the mystery itself is that you must pay attention to the foreshadowing, and they try very hard to get you to notice this "subtly". Jenny's Dad is evil, sorry I had to just blurt it out like that but without that he just look like a looming specter himself, and you need a bit more Dad meat in the first half of the story to establish him, or he just comes across as flat as he does. Joy Tanner is as good as she usually is, except, well what accent is she supposed to have, and where does it keep going. Beyond the accent she is as evil from the first scene she appears in as you think she will be, and that takes something right? Overall I Enjoyed this, I would say it is aimed at a younger demographic surely, the romantic poetry spouting twenty somethings, and younger yet, but you young at heart, lonely hearts might like it as well. It is not a scary sort of ghost story, it is simply a story of revenge that has been a long time coming as these stories usually are.Jesse of www.Jesse.ca