The Sound (2017)
1/10
Boring and incoherent
21 April 2018
Warning: Spoilers
This film didn't get off to a good start with its rather unusually amateurish style and tone at the start. But I didn't begrudge it that, I figure it would be fine... until it started having twitter hashtags and random words and phrases floating on screen when the main character, Kelly Johanssen, speaks them or types them in.

Basically the whole movie has this irritation, with her live-tweeting her attempt to debunk a ghost in a haunted subway station in Canada. She relies on the theory that most ghost sightings are caused by low sound waves below the human ability to hear that causes vibrations in the eyes that cause people to see things in the edge of their vision. This is a real thing and it's very interesting and intriguing, and exactly none of it is in any way important or relevant to the plot here except to try to provide a thin veneer of false mystery as to whether the inevitable spoopy events that unfold are actually real ghosts, or just her suffering from the very same "hallucinations" she herself has relied upon to debunk prior ghost sightings.

Somehow Kelly thinks the best way to tell if the station where the sound vibrations cause nosebleeds, hallucinations, and lightheadedness is actually haunted is to actually go down there and just sit down there for hours, suffering from nosebleeds, hallucinations, and lightheadedness.

The vast majority of this film is basically that. She is directed there by an anonymous messenger online, and despite her prior repeated mentionings of hallucinations and the like, she foolishly falls for the hallucinations almost immediately and ends up calling the police to report a dead body which turns out not to actually be there. Before that, as well, she encounters a random jerkoff teenager who is just loitering around down there smoking, who happens to know about the legend of the station's haunting. Within moments I figured "This kid is probably a ghost or hallucination" and towards the end I was proven right.

One of the cops, a detective, turns out to be the one who anonymously messaged her about the haunted station, and is stalking her, digging up old medical records that showed she was self-admitted into a psychiatric asylum, and then follows her into the station where he is pointlessly belligerent. His scenes with Kelly feel like they were very sloppily edited, or else badly written by someone who forgot to write down everything, because the detective guy is suspicious, shady, obnoxious, and belligerent for absolutely no reason, and at some point pulls a gun on her, threatening her to... do exactly what she's doing.

He wants her to debunk that the place is haunted, and eventually reveals it was him who basically commissioned her to do it. because she's stupid, instead of saying "Yes, okay, this is exactly what I am doing and have been doing until you came down here and pulled a gun on me", he decides to needlessly agitate him by constantly asking "what if I can't debunk it?" which is exactly what you want to say to a delirious jibbering psychopath who has pulled a gun on you.

Luckily, his role comes to an abrupt and incoherent end as he follows a ghosty girl into a room, and she barricades him in, only to suddenly remove the barricade and open it up yelling at him to get out of the room. He wasn't even aware he was being locked in before apparently getting killed or something.

Christopher Lloyd inexplicably appears in the film to roam around and change the lights. He too is one of those miscellaneous background characters you suspect is actually a ghost within the first five minutes and they turn out to actually be a ghost at the end and he ends up serving no purpose in the film at all except to boost the movie.

Meanwhile, expo-dumps have been repeatedly adding lots of pointless backstory, and at some point, despite the ghost supposedly being a woman covered in blood who jumped in front of a train in 1966, she is suddenly tracking a ghost girl named "Emily" with absolutely no connection to the base plot. This feels like something that was added in post-production or at the very last minute, with the "Lady in Red" stuff not edited out. It also serves to make for a pointless twist ending that does nothing and is almost completely unrelated to the story as a whole.

At some point, they seem to have given up filming what they had, and filmed an entirely different movie and forgot to re-film or re-edit the first half.
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