Review #61: The Den (2013)

This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #9: The Den

First, a confession: I've seen this movie before. At least, I think I've seen this movie before. (The fact that I'm not 100% sure might give you an idea of how I feel about it.) From the beginning until the end it all felt very familiar, and there were a few parts where I was able to accurately say what was about to happen before it did. However, I'm not positive if that's because I've seen it before, or if it was just a stereotypical, predictable found-footage movie with nothing surprising or distinct about it.

The Den is a found-footage movie about a woman who takes on a college grant project to meet as many people as she can through an online chat site (like Chatroulette but way more generic) and record everything that happens through her computer. It actually precedes movies like Unfriended and Searching by at least a year or so, which means that it at least gets a point for that. When the movie started I definitely felt like it was a cool concept, and I was eager to watch another found-footage movie that didn't suck!

Unfortunately that's not what I got. This doesn't fall into ALL of the pitfalls that found-footage risks falling into (I can tell a lot of work went into the actual production, it definitely wasn't low-effort) but it's still a lazily-written mess that just assumes you'll go along with whatever happens because hey, it's just a movie right?

Whenever this movie needs something to seem spooky, they have the video gain that dumb digital artifacting/glitching effect that modern found-footage just can't get enough of. Whatever type of video is being watched, whatever context it's being watched in, I guarantee the video will start to glitch out whenever it's inconvenient for the protagonist. There's a point in this movie where the main character's boyfriend gets nabbed by the killer on-camera (while she's looking away, of course) and then the video call ends. She doesn't notice until way later (the timeline of this movie is real weird, more on that in a bit) but when she finally does, it's because her boyfriend has gone missing and nobody believes her despite loads of evidence (more on that too) so she's looking back at the tape. But, for some reason, the tape she's already recorded starts glitching riiiiight at the part where the killer shows up. You might think this is because the writers didn't want her to realize what had happened; no, she still figures it out (by looking closely at the digital artifacts). So why not just have her see the killer? Why put this nonsensical, artificial glitchy effect on the video when it didn't need to be there? Ah, surely it must be yet another time where she shows it to someone and they don't believe her because all they see is a glitchy mess... right? Nope, the tape gets deleted immediately afterward, so it literally did nothing except pad the runtime of this (fairly short) movie by a minute and a half.

This is yet another movie where the entire success of the killer depends on people not paying attention to their surroundings, not believing the protagonist despite mountains of evidence, and weird fake technological problems. If this movie were in any way unique for that I might give them a pass- but no, this is just another rehash of the same concept you've seen a dozen times before. It might predate a few of those movies, but not enough of them to get a pass.

I also mentioned the timeline being weird; they try to make this movie seem like most of it takes place over several weeks- the protagonist is given this grant at the beginning and then we see her checking her email with messages saying she hasn't checked in with the school in a while and they want updates, she writes them an email with some big numbers for how many people she's interacted with, her boyfriend complains about not having seen her in forever because she's always busy working on this grant project- but then there's a point later on where something that happened waaay near the beginning of the movie is hinted at being earlier that very day...

And however potentially interesting or well paced the first half of the movie may be, the last fifteen minutes is basically just one long protracted shakycam chase scene where they make it seem like all of the shenanigans of this film are the work of a huge team of well-connected serial killers (able to coordinate their actions perfectly with the unpredictable digital artifacts of some random person's webcam but unable to do anything but clumsily run at someone trying to escape their gigantic compound). And then- AND THEN! This movie has the audacity to abandon the found-footage medium (turning momentarily into a traditionally-shot film) for the very very last scene, as they attempt something akin to a fourth-wall-break by showing us who's been watching all of these webcam videos for one last twist of the proverbial knife. I can tell they thought they were doing something clever, but it fell flat.

This movie had a lot of potential, it came at a point in time when it could have been great, and they clearly put a lot of work into this; but at its core it's a lazy attempt to do something that's been done many times before and since. As I said at the beginning, even after finishing this movie I'm not 100% sure whether I've watched it before. But I can guarantee you I HAVE seen every frame of The Den, in some other movie somewhere else.

Overall rating: 3/10

How you know this movie is fake: The people on Chatroulette don't put nearly that much work into being perverts