Not the romantic comedy starring Richard Gere…
Most people will attest to the fact that nothing on camera comes close to scaring us more than what happens in our nightmares. ‘Nightmarish’ is an adjective often used to describe horror films but it is rarely accurate. Mr Jones gets about as close to capturing the actual essence of a nightmare as any film I can remember but this is actually a bit of a back handed compliment in as much as nightmares don’t make sense and are nigh on impossible to follow.
A young couple move to the woods in order to work on their relationship and inspire artistic creativity. Once there, they stumble upon the work of an eccentric and anonymous artist as well as his workshop. It soon becomes clear that there is much more at stake than art however, as the world of nightmares begins to seep into our reality.
One big plus in this found footage horror movie is the acting. Jon Foster and Sarah Jones share a convincing chemistry and help to mask some of their characters more outlandish decisions. The plot is an interesting one but it is also kind of thin which results in a film that struggles to remain compelling to the end despite being less than ninety minutes long. Indeed, the final third of the film features little dialogue, instead trying to capture the aforementioned nightmarish atmosphere. While writer/director Karl Mueller does a decent job in capturing something so abstract, the constant cutting, bad lighting and jumbled speech becomes dull pretty quickly and even with such a skinny running time, I doubt that anyone would be too upset by the credits rolling by the end.
This kind of metaphysical approach has been done before of course and done better. Both Grave Encounters and As Above, So Below are better examples of this genre and while Mr Jones is sometimes interesting and occasionally creepy, there is certainly nothing that makes it stand above its peers.
Halloween is a time when viewers are inundated with loads of great horror films. Mr Jones works as an interesting curio but that is all. Certainly not a classic.