Three video cameras are delivered: one to a family, one to a single woman, and one to a clown. Elated that they won a contest, they start filming right away, introducing us to our cast of characters, building our empathy towards them. Yet when they try to stop filming, the tape doesn’t stop, a video of a child being shot is left on their doorstep, and things only escalate from there.
Mockingbird comes to us from Bryan Bertino, writer and director of The Strangers. If one thing stuck with you from that movie, it’s probably the respond to why are the killers doing this: “Because you were home.” This idea that the victims didn’t break a curse, didn’t piss someone off, didn’t have sex at Camp Crystal Lake, didn’t build their house on an ancient burial ground–no, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time is simply terrifying. And Mockingbird appears to fit the same style. These people were chosen at random, and there was no Saw-like thread connecting the three groups, which makes the movie a whole lot scarier!
The standout qualities that this film has is its tone and pacing. The film is split between the three groups: the first two (family and woman) are tense, nerve-wrecking journeys, but the third (the clown) is fun and quite comical… until you begin to see how everything will play out. A little past the half way point, you start to see how all the pieces fit together, and it’s terrifying and sad all at the same time. So knowing what will happen and watching the events play out is an anxious and dreadful experience. The comic relief provided by the clown starts out as a calm between storms, but ends as a tragedy that you just can’t stop watching. I won’t spoil anything, but the suspense definitely hit me hard on the last fifteen minutes of Mockingbird.
But with the good comes the bad. I really enjoyed most everything about Mockingbird until the last two minutes. I had in my notes that one of the positives was that they left the killers mysterious–I hate when the fear created by the unknown is ruined by giving shitty back story. But just as I was ready to stop the movie, Mockingbird reveals the killers’ identities, shocking me and not in a good way. It doesn’t ruin the movie per se, but it opens many plot holes and removes the movie from any plausible reality. There is honestly no way that these killers could have set up such an elaborate scheme, coordinated it between three separate houses, and done this with the technology provided to them in 1995. If it was a different group, I could buy into it, but not this one.
It is important to note that Mockingbird is a found-footage style movie. However, the movie is carefully set in 1995, thus removing many of the found-footage cliches that plague the genre. I won’t even include this as a negative because it works well for the movie and adds to the novelty of the idea. Mockingbird would lose some charm and the characters’ motivation if they didn’t have cameras that they were forced to bring everywhere with them.
In summary, Mockingbird is a fun horror movie with a novel idea, great pacing, humor, and suspense. The narrative isn’t the tightest, some of the characters are interchageable, and the ending may leave a sour taste in your mouth. But it is on Netflix, so go give it a watch. If anything, watch it for the final scene, in which a mansion is filled completely with red balloons (how cool would it be if a haunt ended like that?!). Let me know what you thought and if you hated the reveal as much as I did.
