When the Paranormal Activity movies seemingly came to an end in 2015, part of me hoped that the franchise would stay dead and buried. As much as I enjoyed the first three, the later sequels were so unbearably bad that the whole thing just stopped being fun to watch. And I don't think I'm the only one that felt that way, considering the continually diminishing box office returns of each successive entry into the series.
You can't always get what you want, however. Six years after The Ghost Dimension brought Toby the demon's found footage adventures to a close, the Paranormal Activity name has been resurrected with a movie released exclusively on the Paramount+ streaming service. And truth be told, I'd have had no idea this new chapter, subtitled Next of Kin, was even being released at all if I hadn't seen someone mention it on Twitter this morning. I haven't seen that first commercial or advertisement or anything for it. So between that and my displeasure with what the franchise turned into over time, I can't say I'm actually really excited for it. But what the heck, it's the spooky season, after all. So why don't we check it out and hope for the best?
The movie centers around Margot (Emily Bader), a young woman from Arizona who was abandoned by her mother when she was a baby. She's spent much of her life wondering about her biological family she's never known, wondering why her mother gave her up, and has spent much of her life searching for answers. She eventually makes some progress, however, when she's contacted by Samuel Bailer (Henry Ayers-Brown), who has recently left the Amish community he grew up in. Samuel discovered that Margot is his cousin through an online DNA testing service and offers to take her to his old community in rural New York so that she can finally meet her biological family.
Accompanied by cameraman Chris (Roland Buck III) and sound guy Dale (Dan Lippert) so that she can make a documentary about the search for her past, Margot travels to New York and is introduced to Jacob (Tom Nowicki), the Bailer family patriarch and her biological grandfather. Jacob offers them a room for a few days, and while Chris and Dale try capturing some of the local flavor, Margot goes off in search of answers for questions she's had all her life. But the deeper she digs, the closer she comes to learning that some mysteries should stay unsolved.
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin is not a particularly good movie. It takes cues not just from the past movies in the series with the occasional cheap jump scare, but from the horror flicks released by A24 in recent years. Movies like Robert Eggers' The Witch or Ari Aster's Hereditary and Midsommar, flicks that are less dependent on jump scares and more focused on building an esoteric sense of dread. (And cults, can't forget the cults.) The big difference is that Next of Kin isn't nearly as good as either of those movies. Any effective scares to be found are few and far between, and the rest is nothing that hasn't been seen in a hundred other horror movies. It doesn't even bring anything new to this franchise beyond changing the setting from suburban California to a farm in New York. It's a dull, ultimately pointless movie that's only worth watching if you've run out of any other scary movies to watch this Halloween weekend.
Director William Eubank doesn't really do much to garner any sort of enthusiasm, or suspense, or any sort of reaction at all from the audience. I'm not even really sure Eubank knew what kind of movie he really wanted to make. There's a ton of odd editing choices, a handful of scenes (especially during the climax) that suddenly go into slow motion for a few seconds, and even a bit near the end of the movie that looks like it was shot traditionally instead of in the handheld "found footage" style.
I can't emphasize that last part enough, either. The movie already looks really slick thanks to it being established that the characters are using high end cameras instead of consumer grade camcorders like in the other movies, but there are times where the "found footage" concept is betrayed with camera angles that they couldn't possibly have gotten had the cast been shooting it themselves like the cast would have you believe. That's jarring enough, but when we get to one sequence near the end of the movie where nobody is holding a camera (as far as I could tell, anyway) and things are still shot perfectly for about sixty seconds, it takes me right out of the movie. I can forgive a movie like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon for shifting from a mockumentary style to being shot traditionally because it fits the movie's narrative and is actually addressed by the characters. But here's it's painfully out of place and makes Eubank look lazy.
He isn't helped by the lackluster script, either. Writer Christopher Landon has worked on four of the movies in the series, so you'd think he could come up with something, anything, to shake things up. If you're gonna reboot the franchise, give us something fresh. But nope, he doesn't. Outside of the change in setting I've already mentioned, Landon doesn't give us anything new. The characters are either boring or forgettable (or both), with only Dale the sound guy having anything even remotely resembling a personality.
There's also very little time given to building any sort of nuance or depth to the villains' master plan. It just goes from Margot and Chris discovering some a few strange clues and saying "huh, this is kinda weird," some more clues that prompt a "this is really weird" reaction from Margot, and then we immediately run into the climax with no real build toward anything outside of one or two throwaway lines about what's happening as we're running at 100 miles an hour towards the conclusion. Combining this with a predictable open ending, you get the feeling that Landon just figured he'd give us the bare minimum and fill in the blanks if he has to write a sequel rather than giving us a fully fleshed-out story.
And then there's the cast, who are pretty much as forgettable as everything else in Next of Kin. Dan Lippert has a few fun moments as the movie's comic relief, and that's the best thing I can really say about anybody. Emily Bader does an okay enough job despite her character having practically no depth whatsoever, and the vibe I got from Tom Nowicki was that they wish they could've hired Clancy Brown to play the role instead, and that's about all I really have to say about the cast. They're all just kinda there.
If you've seen literally any of the other Paranormal Activity movies, even the Japanese spinoff or the Asylum's ripoff, you've seen Next of Kin too. There's absolutely nothing here that improves or builds upon the same old formula that was worn out when the last movie came out in 2015, nothing that reinvents the series or makes this particular one worth watching. It seems appropriate that this went directly to a streaming app without much fanfare, because it's exactly the kind of movie that would have gone straight to video and faded into obscurity while collecting dust on a shelf at Blockbuster twenty years ago. If you're desperate to watch any scary movie, give this a watch, I guess. But take my word for it, you're not missing anything if you don't.
Final Rating: **
