Mark Reviews Movies: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: NEXT OF KIN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 29, 2021

After a six-movie cycle that went on five movies too long, this found-footage horror series gets a reboot with Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin. The new installment is a complete reset in terms of story, so no awareness of the previous entries is necessary to understand what's happening in this one. That doesn't make it any less predictable or inconsistent within the franchise and on its own terms, though.

The screenplay comes from Christopher Landon, who wrote or co-wrote four of the movies in the previous sequence and directed the fifth installment, and that familiarity with the series might not have been the best decision for taking it a new and/or different direction. A lot of what we've come to expect, either from this series or from found-footage horror movies in general, remains completely intact here.

A group of people record just about everything with a camera or two, even when holding up or keeping track of said camera might not be the best move for basic survival. This story, which abandons the notion of setting up stationary cameras to keep track of otherworldly happenings in a single location, at least has a bit of an excuse.

It's presented a fake documentary, in which a young woman named Margot (Emily Bader) is searching for answers about her origins. She was adopted after being left at a hospital as a baby, and with her filmmaker friend Chris (Roland Buck III), Margot decides to document the process of meeting members of her biological family. We understand why the cameras would keep running, even as creepier and creepier things happen around the farm owned by Margot's extended birth family. Still, there's always that voice of disbelief in one's head—or yelling quite loudly at the screen—whenever the characters are the ones doing the running.

The point, perhaps, is that, while Landon and director William Eubank might have changed the specific mythology of this series with this reboot (The general part, in which ghosts or demons exist and cause a lot of increasingly dangerous problems, is still here), they haven't done anything significant to alter what this movie does and how it does it. We're still watching people record too many things, in order to lull us into a sense of security. We're still prompted, by the visuals (a beam of light from the camera or, better, night-vision) and the soundtrack, to anticipate when the mundane conversations and exposition-dumping have ceased, so that a sequence of suspense and inevitable scares can happen.

We're still left wondering why the cameras seem more important to these characters than their own or their friends' survival, and we're still impressed how, even under duress, the same characters are able to get the best shots and coverage whenever something does come out of the shadows. Eubank cheats pretty deliberately in that last regard for a couple of moments, including a climactic confrontation with the supernatural threat when the director just disposes of the faux-documentary style (unless the ghost/demon/witch is actually holding camera, too, which, at this point in the history of these kinds of movies, wouldn't be much of a surprise).

The gimmick, beyond the basic style of the movie, is that Margot's biological family is an Amish community. She, Chris (whose arsenal of high-tech cameras and technology is woefully underutilized), and aggressively odd sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert) are brought to the farm by Samuel (Henry Ayres-Brown). He's a family member on his year-long retreat outside the community, who found Margot by way of an at-home genetic test. Eventually welcomed to stay at the homestead by patriarch Jacob (Tom Nowicki), the trio of filmmakers gradually—and then very suddenly—uncover a dark secret or two within this community.

The setting, with its austere décor and reliance on natural light, is appropriately eerie and confining (until a pair of characters get away and don't think to ask for help). A couple of sequences, which have Margot exploring an off-limits attic and being lowered into a deep mineshaft, make decent use of what we can't see and can only hear. It is odd that Margot, who's unnecessarily courageous in such moments, becomes a screaming, crying damsel during the extended climax. Then again, a movie that relies on so many familiar setups, contrivances (a generator that conveniently waits to be inconvenient until it's dark outside), and obstacles (a car battery that randomly dies) certainly would be fine falling back on that cliché.

A new storyline doesn't mean the usual trappings will become new by extension. That's a lesson the makers of Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin haven't learned.

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