Motion Detected

Amateurish acting, clunky writing, and chintzy production design can all drag down a low-budget horror film – and often do! – but nothing spells doom quite like a confused, poorly thought-out premise. Horror fans are a notoriously forgiving lot, and they are often willing to squint their way through even the cheapest, sloppiest productions, so long as there’s a gnarly monster or gruesome set piece lurking somewhere underneath all the slapdash craft. However, almost nothing can redeem a film that lacks a clear sense of what the hell it is doing or why. Case in point: The dire horror-thriller Motion Detected, which plays like the Tijuana flea-market version of a bottom-tier Black Mirror episode. Almost every aspect of the film is tacky and poorly executed, but what truly sinks this feature directorial debut from Justin Gallaher and Sam Roseme is not its shoestring budget but its conceptual inanity and incoherence.

Eva (Natascha Esca) and her husband, Miguel (Carlo Mendez), have recently relocated from Mexico City to Los Angeles. As the film belabors through repeated flashback sequences, the primary reason for this move is Eva’s lingering trauma surrounding a home-invasion incident. While she was home alone, a masked man entered her bedroom and threatened her at knifepoint, only to inexplicably vanish into the night. Eva’s assailant was later identified as El Diablo, a serial killer who has butchered multiple women in Mexico City and remains at large. Hence the couple’s relocation almost 2,000 miles away, where they settle into a luxurious rental house in a quiet neighborhood. As the leasing agent (Katelyn MacMullen) explains, Eva and Miguel’s new residence is also equipped with a sophisticated security system and integrated smart-home features, all monitored by the mysterious tech company Diablo. (Eva never even comments on the serendipity of this, which somehow makes it even dumber.)

Notwithstanding his wife’s obvious unease at being left alone in this fortress-like McMansion in an unfamiliar country, Miguel almost immediately jets back to Mexico City for a week of work-related meetings. (There’s a throwaway line about Eva’s job search that never amounts to anything, and we never learn exactly what either of them do for a living.) Isolated and restless, Eva makes a half-hearted attempt to replicate the standard bougie California lifestyle – lots of fitness and wellness routines – but she soon becomes preoccupied with the house’s buggy, oppressive security features. Indeed, the Diablo system almost seems to be actively gaslighting her, locking and unlocking doors spontaneously and refusing to follow her commands. Occasionally a technician (Roland Buck III) shows up to hand-wave these incidents away as routine glitches, but the film establishes through omniscient third-person scenes that there is an intentional maliciousness to the system’s behavior. This isn’t a psychological thriller with an unreliable protagonist, but a sci-fi-horror tale about an evil artificial intelligence. Or maybe a literally demonic security company? It’s a little unclear what subgenre we’re inhabiting here, which is one of the film’s many, many problems.

The kindest thing that one can say about Motion Detected is that it possesses a kernel of an interesting idea concerning technology and its relationship to middle-class anxieties about crime and safety. In the feature’s most unnerving and trenchant scene, the Diablo system scans Eva’s fearful browsing of local security-camera footage on a Nextdoor-like app, and then starts actively pushing similar videos of sinister, masked prowlers into her feed. Gallaher and Roseme connect this feedback loop of Internet-enabled paranoia to the escalating structure of a traditional haunted-house tale, wherein a solitary soul is slowly driven to madness by the malevolent force inhabiting their home. The screenplay also has some modestly intriguing racial and ethnic subtext, as a desperate Eva abandons the aspirational trappings of a rich, white Angelino and returns to her roots, seeking the protection of the Mexican folk deity Santa Muerte.

Unfortunately, pretty much everything else about Motion Detected is a mess. The performances are almost all dreadful, save for a glorified cameo from reliable character actor Bob Clendenin (Cougar Town). Not that the clumsy, excruciating dialogue is doing the performers any favors. Esca in particular is saddled with some truly awful material. Trusting neither their lead actress nor the audience, the writer-directors oblige Esca to voice seemingly every thought that pops into Eva’s head, even when the character is alone, which makes her seem like either a moron or a lunatic. Gallaher and Roseme rely on a grab bag of creaky horror and sci-fi conventions – a dollop of Paranormal Activity here, a dash of Pulse there – and deploy them with all the dreary artlessness of house-flippers covering a sloppy rehab job in gray laminate. The same cheap-looking “glitchy” visual effects and canned formal flourishes are deployed over and over, such that they thoroughly lose whatever marginal impact they might have possessed.

That said, what truly bricks Motion Detected is not its slipshod manufacture but its fundamentally unintelligible premise. Viewers vainly hoping for a satisfactory resolution – or at least an internally consistent explanation for the film’s events – will be deeply, deeply disappointed. The filmmakers make no attempt to resolve their story’s seemingly contradictory threads. Is Eva a hapless victim in a haywire high-tech nightmare? The tormented heroine in a ghost-in-the-machine haunting? A dollar-bin Rosemary caught in a satanic conspiracy? The film doesn’t seem to know or even care. To be clear, there’s no artful ambiguity here, just heaping handfuls of generic nonsense hurled at a wall in the hopes that something sticks. The result is exceedingly frustrating, at best, and occasionally so monumentally stupid that the film provokes unintentional laughter. It’s never a good sign when your feature-length live-action horror movie is outclassed by a “Treehouse of Horror” segment on The Simpsons.