Aaron is a freelance videographer. He answers an ad on Craigslist for a one-day job to videotape a man dying from brain cancer, who wants to leave a video journal of one day of his life for his unborn son. The instructions are for Aaron to tape himself driving up to the mountains. When he arrives and meets the man who hired him, Joseph, things turn creepy right away, and get more and more uncomfortable for Aaron as the day progresses. When Aaron is ready to leave in the evening, he can’t find his keys. Joseph convinces him In the next few days, the learns that the job wasn’t quite what he thought is was.
Creep is the 2014 movie we ended up choosing to watch on Halloween night, when the pandemic kept the streets empty of trick-or-treaters, and we were looking for a scary movie. There are exactly two actors in this movie, Aaron (Patrick Brice) and Joseph (Mark Duplass). It could have been a play.
This film would not win awards in cinematography, since the entire movie is filmed by a hand-held video camera. You hardly ever see both actors in the same frame, since one of them always holds to camera, consistent with the plot. The picture is always shaky, to the point where I felt dizzy at times. Creep got 89% from the critics on the Tomatometer, but I have to say I just found it – well – creepy. Being what it was, I expected that axe in the front yard of the house in the mountains to have some role in the movie, and indeed it did in the end. But Creep did not draw me in. I watched it from a distance, so to say, as an exercise, rather than a movie I was drawn into by anything it offered. No music, bad pictures, shaky frames, very unlikable characters, silly plot, none of it spoke to me. While it didn’t specify the location, the scenery looked a lot like Big Bear, California to me, and I could relate to the cabin, having rented some there from time to time, and trails in the woods, and the scenes by the lake.
If you want to see a weird and creepy movie, do watch Creep, but don’t expect to write home about it afterwards.
