The Elf
Director:
Writer:
Stars:
Natassia Halabi, Gabriel Miller, Lassiter Holmes | See full cast & crew »
review
I think I’ve figured out what happened here. Writer/director Justin Price and his cinematographer/editor, Khu, were putting the picture together and they realized they only had about thirty or forty minutes’ worth of usable footage. Lacking the budget for rewrites and reshoots, they put into the movie all the stuff filmmakers usually leave out: the shots that slip in and out of focus; the pans where the camera doesn’t immediately hit its mark; the shots where the foreground is in focus but the action is in the background; the lengthy pauses between lines of dialogue; the moment at the end of a scene where an actor just sort of stands there before the director calls “cut”; the shots where the lighting is poor, where the camera never seems to know where to look, where the actors never seem to know what they’re supposed to be doing.
The movie runs 90 minutes and feels roughly twice as long, and that’s a real shame. Hiding behind the shaky camerawork and the bad lighting and the headache-inducingly out-of-focus shots is a pretty good thirty- or forty-minute Christmas-themed thriller. The story’s not bad: a couple visit a junky toy/antique store, the guy finds a creepy elf doll that somehow finds its way back to the couple’s house, the couple has a big family dinner that night, the elf goes all homicidal. Hardly an original idea, but executed well it could have been a fun little short film.
Instead, it’s a 90-minute session of cinematic torture. I’m sorry, but it is. It’s a drain on the audience’s patience, and, speaking as someone who has seen the whole thing, it requires a certain amount of determination to keep from turning it off. But as badly as I feel for someone who sits down to watch the movie, I feel worse for the actors. They’re not very good, but the filmmakers make them seem a lot worse than they are. When, for example, Gabriel Miller (playing the tortured Nick) writhes comically on the bathroom floor, mouth gaping silently, or when he stares off camera for what feels like five full minutes without saying a word, that’s the fault of the filmmakers: Price and Khu didn’t shoot or cut those scenes properly, and they turned a mediocre performance into a spectacularly bad one. All of the performances are seriously damaged, made to look ridiculous when they are merely amateurish, because of the way the movie is shot and assembled.
I can’t say there’s nothing I like about the movie. You can always find something to like, even in the worst films. But the moments of enjoyment and cinematic pleasure are few and far between, here.
