The Gracefield Incident
“Do you have to film everything?”
That’s the opening line of dialogue in The Gracefield Incident, the first feature film from Mathieu Ratthe, which, over the course of 90 minutes, never properly answers that question. The “found footage” horror movie can occasionally provide an innovative and informative point of view, but more often it is a crutch for filmmakers looking to mine suspense through a choppy, sometimes nauseous, first-person camera angle. In this case, it functions as the latter, and the movie wears its references and inspirations, both found footage and not—everything from The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield to Signs to Cabin in the Woods—on its sleeve, wrinkled in clichés that check off the genre’s pre-established boxes.
Ratthe, who also wrote the screenplay, plays Matthew, a video game editor in Canada who haphazardly films his pregnant wife (Kimberly Laferriere) while driving to the hospital. Not a minute into their conversation, the car is T-boned (a frustrating and frequently filmed trope), managing to take his right eye and, much more catastrophically, their unborn child. Ten months later, Matthew, obsessed with filming, has embedded an iPhone camera into a prosthetic eye, giving the movie its primary lens. He and his wife pick up four friends for a weekend vacation and the prior tragedy, which tries its best to haunt the movie, hasn’t deterred him from continuing to record video in the driver’s seat. Nor does it grapple with the logistics and ethical responsibilities of using an artificial device implanted into his eye socket, despite the devoted montage of its creation.
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