Review of Neverlake

Neverlake (2013)
5/10
Storytelling
28 October 2014
Warning: Spoilers
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
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