SincereFinest
disgusting, overrated, pointless
Beystiman
It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
Billy Ollie
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
Ssdcrna
Not sure why all the low ratings, this movie delivered exactly as would be expected. It offers a fictional and extra creepy view on the Jonestown massacre event. It mixes the twisted psychology of cult mentality with supernatural possibilities. Spooky good Netflix find!
suite92
The Three Acts: The initial tableaux: Jim Jacobs runs a cult camp at Heaven's Veil Ranch, circa 1982. He's a self- appointed mage who does miraculous healing and the like. He does meditation, astral projections, telekinesis, and whatever else will inspire loyalty. His big draw, though, is promising techniques to gain eternal life.Yeah, right.The trick is, one has to die first before getting the big dividend. Indeed, every one at Heaven's Veil does die back in 1982, save for Sarah Hope.Spin forward to the present, roughly. Sarah Hope is recruited by Maggie Price and her brother Christian to do a documentary on the Ranch. Maggie's father was the FBI agent in charge of investigating the Veil, and he ended up hanging himself when Maggie was three years old.Delineation of conflicts: As one might expect, things start to go badly soon after the film starts.The caretaker of Heaven's Veil was not all that welcoming. Film crew member Ed takes the group's van and kills himself by running into a tree at high speed. The group is more than a bit isolated by distance, since they are now all on foot.Sarah finds the more secret parts of the place, which include multiple films of the inner workings of Jim Jacobs' group. The filmmakers hope to find out what the driving forces were behind the mass death at Heaven's Veil. Does something or someone at the Veil want those secrets kept secret?Resolution: The film jumped the shark around 53:00 in. The transition from somewhat reasonable thriller to wholesale supernatural bullshit was sudden. The turnabout at the end was well-written, but I had long since quit caring.
elizrug
I am the biggest critic of horror films. If there's just one thing that doesn't seem right, I automatically dislike a film. I really liked this, though.It has a unique story, one that hasn't been touched upon very often: scary cults. It has a good cast who all work well together. There's not too much crappy dialogue, like the ubiquitous "Die you f-ing b****!" that is found in a lot of movies. (I've never understood how someone, who is fighting for their life, could be thinking of screaming cuss words at an attacker, and I curse like a truck driver.) I'm not a huge fan of Jessica Alba but this role worked for her.The scares were a success. I jumped a couple of times.Overall I think it's a very good scary movie. Is it Oscar-worthy? No, but that's not why I watched it.
TheBarleyGuy
Take a deep breath, surprisingly this is NOT a found footage movie. With that said, I almost wish that it was. What it is, instead, is a combination of found footage elements and traditional narrative film making. Here's the problem: the two do not mix well, and create a bit of a mess. I understand the desire to combine the two, but it just doesn't work, and you get a movie like The Veil.Perhaps the most bizarre part of the movie are the writer and director. Phil Joanou helmed the piece, and this is the man responsible for that Punisher short that everyone liked, the Dwanye Johnson vehicle Gridiron Gang, and 3 U2 documentaries, while the script was penned by Robert Ben Garant, who wrote Hell Baby, and A Night At The Museum 2 when he wasn't starring in Reno 911. These forces came together to make an ultimately bland mess of a horror film.The movie stars Jessica Alba (Sin City), Thomas Jane (The Punisher), and Lily Rabe (American Horror Story) along with a lovable cast of dead-meat characters, as they head to the site of what is basically Jonestown (without calling it Jonestown). Once they are here, a weird mixture of horror clichés, jump scares, and lazy tropes lead to their deaths. Spoiler alert, I guess. The performances are fine, everyone brings about as much as they can to this particular script, but all in all the "star power" on show here isn't enough to save it.The main story, of Alba and her team headed back to the site of the massacre, is edited to be dark, high contrast, however the rest of the film isn't edited to match that. At one point, when looking at photos taken of their campsite, the photos are clearly of the real environment and they clash massively with the look of the film. I understand stylistic choices of editing, and wouldn't even begrudge them that if it all matched up. However, they different parts of the film clash so much that it almost feels like two movies crammed together, cobbled together with fair-ground haunted house level scares.The scary moments have no cohesion, they simply exist to give you a jolt and to make you feel like this movie is scary, which it really isn't. The movie also includes a lot of "watching the tapes we found in the spooky house", and those really don't worth either. It seems like The Veil can't decide what movie it wants to be, and that really hurts it more than anything else.All in all this really doesn't work. The story is a mess and flies all over the place, and it feels more like a "Yeah whatever, bro, let's make a scary movie. People will eat up any old s**t in that genre", than anything else. I really hope 2016 picks up from here, but it's hard to feel too optimistic.
