If you’re over found footage film, keep walking. If you think you can handle another one, then Puzzle Box might be worth 73 minutes of your time.  This small Australian film blends the found footage genre with a growing subgenre: addiction horror.  Within the past decade there has been a substantive increase in addiction-as-horror/the horror of addiction/haunting-as-metaphor-for-addiction-and-vice-versa narratives (see: The Haunting of Hill House Netflix series, Doctor Sleep, the remake of Evil Dead, Alyce Kills, Lovely Molly, etc.), all with varying degrees of success and accuracy in representing the challenges and struggles of the addicted individual.

In the case of Puzzle Box, sisters Olivia (Laneikka Denne) and Kait (Kaitlyn Boyé) rent a vacation house in the woods for Kait, a recovering addict who has already been in rehab three times, to “self-rehabilitate.” Olivia is along for support but also to document the process, both to show Kait the progress she is making and to prove to the folks back home that Kait is both serious about recovery and has her addiction under control.  So the first box of found footage horror (why is someone filming everything?) is checked early.  There are points later in the film when it is not clear who (or what) is doing the filming, but at least at the beginning we have a plausible set up.  The second box is checked immediately as well: they get to the cabin in the woods (part of a group of vacation homes in the immediate area) and the eerie things begin happening: they cannot find the key the owner promised was under the mat, there is screaming in the woods, and when they finally do enter their rental, the owner has left a bottle of wine, despite Olivia insisting there be no addictive substances, drugs or alcohol on the property.

They go from being locked out of the house to being trapped in it when the power goes out and they are separated.  The title is thus revealed to refer to at least two things. The house is a puzzle box – Kait is in the hallway in the dark, speaking on the phone to Olivia who insists she is in the same exact hallway with the power back on. Did Kait somehow end up in one of the other cabins, or can the puzzle box of a house send them through time and space?  Second, Kait’s addiction is the other puzzle box she simply cannot seem to get out of.  As she devolves we cannot be certain if Kait killed her doctor, killed a woman in the cabin, or if what we see in the film is, in fact, real.

Writer/director Jack Dignan offers a fairly interesting analogy of addiction-as-horror. The problem being if the audience has seen any found footage films then they have seen this film already: the camera is turned on the person using the camera for a “confessional” moment, lots of running through the woods or the house with a shaky cam so the audience only sees blurred scenery jiggling by, long static shots that allow for something in the distance, heretofore unseen slowly emerge into the frame, and the first twenty minutes simply being “establishing” shots of the sisters getting set up in the cabin which makes one ask “who the hell would film this?” In short, Puzzle Box is not at all a bad film, but it’s not a particularly original one either.