BLOAT - Mark Reviews Movies

Bloat, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 6, 2025

There can be a good reason to tell a story entirely from the perspective of looking at a computer screen. Bloat never finds it, and because of that, writer/director Pablo Absento's movie becomes a frustrating exercise in watching a gimmick unfold without any other motivation behind it.

It's definitely not the story, which is the stuff of so many other horror movies. In it, two parents begin to suspect that one of their kids has been possessed by a demon-like presence. What's funny is that the parent who isn't even present and seemingly has more important things on his plate is the one who becomes entirely invested in trying to figure out what is happening to his son. He does so by doing a lot of web searches, staring at assorted online news articles and sites, and coming up with new ways to keep digital tabs on his absent family.

That man is Jack (Ben McKenzie), a military officer with an uncomfortable habit of recording he and his wife's most private and emotionally strained moments. It happens first when he's recording a seemingly exciting event: the birth of the couple's third child. After his wife Hannah (Bojana Novakovic) delivers the baby, though, the doctors and nurses scramble to action, because something has gone wrong. Jack keeps recording the frantic efforts to save the baby and his wife's distress on his cellphone, for no other reason, it seems, than so that audience can get this bit of back story for the characters.

Some time passes, and through a series of text messages on Jack's laptop screen, we see the two discuss the need to move past their child's unexpected death and to find a way for the family to get closer again. Just as some meetings could have been avoided with an email, some conversations are probably best had face-to-face, but again, how would know get the setup for the plot if this vital conversation didn't occur within the confines of what could be seen on a screen?

The whole movie becomes an increasingly unlikely set of excuses to keep the action stuck within a single monitor or, as the plot reaches its climax, a series of different screens. After planning a family vacation to Tokyo, Jack is called back to his military base, following a string of attacks on U.S. military operations in the Middle East. He can't go on the trip, obviously, so he spends most of his time talking to Hannah or the couple's two sons—Steve (Malcolm Fuller) and Kyle (Sawyer Jones)—on video calls, in emails, and by way of texts (Is the bloat of the title also meant to imply the obvious waste of taxpayer money on the guy using his professional time to deal with personal matters?).

Anyway, Kyle nearly drowns in a river outside Tokyo—an event that is, obviously, recorded almost in full by Hannah and a stranger. Soon enough, the boy begins to act strangely—subsisting entirely of a diet of partially eaten cucumbers, staying very quiet or becoming uncharacteristically violent, and being drawn to water. The screenplay comes up with a cheap excuse to keep the three in Japan, so Jack has to do an investigation into his son's odd behavior remotely.

That's about as exciting and frightening as it sounds, which is to say that it isn't in the slightest. The answer to Kyle's changes, of course, will be apparent as soon they happen to anyone with a passing knowledge of horror tales, but the script drags out the mystery so that we can watch more browser windows filled with text. Does anybody actually highlight important text as they read it? That's a good question to aim at Jack, because he sometimes does and other times doesn't.

Eventually, he has Steve install some motion-activated cameras throughout the house where the three are staying, which doesn't figure into things until the third act. Jack also enlists former military comrade Ryan (Kane Kosugi) to go to Tokyo—on what turns out to be a hilariously useless and incompetent expedition to find evidence of a mythical creature in the woods.

Again, most of this is seen from the confines of a single computer screen, and the self-imposed limitations of the filmmaking here don't help generate suspense and keep the scare attempts repetitive. Beyond that, Bloat builds toward a final confrontation that, apart from being as predictable as everything else in the movie, is rendered nearly incoherent by the restricted view allowed by the gimmick.

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