PROJECT Z - Mark Reviews Movies

Project Z, Dark Star Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

It would be presumptuous to declare that the gimmick of the found footage horror movie is dead (if it already hasn't been creatively deceased for several years at this point), because some filmmaker might come along and do something new, unique, or just plainly effective with the conceit. However, a movie like Project Z isn't that revitalizing kick the subgenre needs. This one hints at the potential of some in-the-know fun, with its self-referential premise, but it gradually succumbs to a bunch of clichés within both its behind-the-scenes story about the making of a movie and its inevitable climax.

The specific gimmick here involves a group of student filmmakers in Norway, who have traveled to a remote part of county for their production. It's to be a zombie movie—an experimental one, perhaps, if the talk from Julie (Elli Harboe), the movie's director and co-screenwriter, about the protagonist having a threesome with a pair of zombies is to be believed. None of that suggested experimentation comes to pass within the movie-within-the-movie or, for that matter, within writer/director Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken's own movie.

In the first part of that equation, we basically get a straightforward horror tale, in which "Rebecca" (Iben Akerlie) and "Thomas" (Arthur Berning) travel through a remote part of Norway in a camper, hit a dog on the road to their destination, and stumble across an abandoned hotel, where, as it turns out, a bunch of zombies have taken up residence. There are some bloody attacks, a chase through the woods and fields, and a showdown that might be a joke about how Julie might have watched a lot of genre-bending movies but doesn't quite understand why the best of them are successful.

It's tough to tell where the jokes end and Dahlsbakken's own imagination runs dry, though, because there's the second part of this movie. It depicts the behind-the-scenes drama of Julie's perfectionism, her collaborator and boyfriend—as well as the movie's cinematographer—Felix (Vebjørn Enger) becoming a bit too flirty with the movie's leading lady, the lead actress being more obsessed with her social media influence than her character, and the lead actor trying to maintain a romantic relationship back home with a woman who is clearly finished with him.

Those two actors within the production, by the way, share the same first names as the actors playing them, just as the movie-within-the-movie's guest star Dennis Storhøi plays a tongue-in-cheek version of himself. Maybe it's a pop-cultural barrier, but it's difficult to tell if Arkerlie and Berning are sending up their own personas. It might just be the writing, because Storhøi's character is clearly intended to be an act of self-deprecation—washed-up, playing the "I'll call my agent" card on a student movie, pining for the days when he was in a movie with Antonio Banderas.

Some of this is broadly amusing, if completely predictable. Equally predictable is the eventual revelation that the crew will be enduring a supernatural event somewhat similar to the characters in the movie they're making. Some meteorites strike in the area, leading Felix and making-of videographer Leon (Jonis Josef) to investigate a nearby crater. The only minor surprise here is the means by which members of the cast and crew become zombie-like entities, but once the mild twist of expectations happens, the rest of the plot becomes a routine scare show.

It takes a while for the story to reach that point, as the drama among the cast and crew members boils over without any real reason to care about them or their troubles (Julie insists that the characters in her movie are developed well, because that's important for an audience to connect with the material, and the reminder of that only forces us to recognize how bland all of the movie's actual characters are). When it does, Dahlsbakken gives us multiple cameras, filming for questionable reasons, held by a few characters in different parts of and outside the house.

A couple pieces of staging, such as one that has two cameras looking in different directions and revealing different pieces of information in the same room, are somewhat clever. Most of it amounts to jump scares, characters screaming, and the camera shaking as someone runs from a threat.

Even its final note, which might be an attempt at sending up how real-life trauma so easily can transformed into entertainment, fails, mainly by going against the movie's own established logic. Neither scary nor particularly funny, Project Z is a horror satire with too-obvious intentions and execution.

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