The Pact (DVD)

Starring: Caity Lotz, Casper Van Dien, Mark Steger, Agnes Bruckner
Director: Nicholas McCarthy
Running Time: 89 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: October 1st 2012

There’s a little bit of every different kind of horror in The Pact – supernatural, psychological, slasher and haunted house, amongst other. Expanding his successful short film, Nicholas McCarthy concocts a horror that offers little new except mixing up horror tropes from all over the map into something that sets out to put the audience on the edge of their seats. It sometimes works, but it’s all a bit too spare to fully succeed.

Following the death of her mother, Annie reluctantly returns to her childhood home, where she expects to find her sister, Nichole. However her sis has gone missing. Initially Annie assumes her sibling has slipped back into drug addiction and that’s why she’s nowhere to be seen. However soon strange things begin to happen in Annie’s mother’s house, which seem supernatural in origin. These events begin to dredge up the past, both from Annie’s history and her mother’s.

McCarthy’s film starts out with an almost indie sensibility and an attempt to build a character who’ll keep our interest throughout the running time. However when things start going bump in the house, it rather forgets the characterisation and instead concentrates on building some tension. It does a pretty good job of this. While a lot of suspenseful horrors use shocks to dissipate the tension, McCarthy’s film often seems like an exercise in how long you can keep a sense of unease running. It’s not just when weird things are happening in the house that the suspense is there, as even when Annie is elsewhere there’s a sense of things not being quite right.

The problems come from the fact that while the script works early on, McCarthy’s spare dialogue and desire to keep a sense of mystery means that when it starts to explain itself, it still feels like it’s trying to be too obscure for its own good. With so much tension built early on, it really needs a good payoff so that it properly satisfies, but on this score The Pact doesn’t deliver. It doesn’t help either that the title is never properly explained, suggesting there’s more to this film and we’re not properly being told about it.

Overall Verdict: There’s enough in The Pact to suggest McCarthy is a director to watch out for and he certainly knows how to create tension, but it’s ultimately all build-up and only half-satisfactory payoff.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac