coycolimore Review of The Conspiracy

The Conspiracy (2012)

A blueprint on how to do a lot with a little.

[7/10 · 28 September 2022]

I don't know what kind of budget this movie had, but it clearly wasn't a big one. And yet, this has enough in it to lure you in, keep you interested, and even surprise you in the end. How did they accomplish that? Well, it certainly wasn't with big explosions, special effects, or gore. It's with a believable script, a well defined storyline, and solid acting. This shows that found footage is not always an excuse to cover the limitations of the budget (or of the skills of the makers). In this case, it simply is an intriguing way of telling the story. This is by no means a new idea, but how do you engage your audience when your subject is something controversial that some people believe? You tell the story from the point of view of a skeptic. That way your viewer has the impression of forming their own opinion on what's going on based on the facts that happen before their eyes, without having notiions randomly spoon fed to them. This is why The Exorcist is a great movie and The Conjuring is not. The former has two skeptics as the main characters dealing with the subject matter throughout most of the film. The latter shows two soldiers of Jesus tackling the evil from the get go. The ending, which many people criticize, is another strong point of this film. Again, because it downplays itself, formally telling you that nothing actually happened. But strongly hinting that it was all real, that someone did get slaughtered there, and the survivors were then forced to act as though it was all a sharade, part of the show. Again, nothing new, Eyes Wide Shut showed exactly the same thing (and arguably better), but The Conspiracy did it from a different angle. I went through some of the negative reviews and I can group them into two categories: 1) disappointed conspiracy theorists who didn't see enough of their silly beliefs portrayed on screen; 2) people who like to pose as expert movie critics, criticizing the acting and/or the script without being able to objectively tell what was wrong or what didn't work. A possible third group, which I placed under 2), includes those who didn't see enough gore to classify this as a horror. I watched it for the second time today and I can tell you I enjoyed myself just as much as I did the first time, almost a decade ago.