This movie felt to me almost unfinished. The plot is fairly staightforward, as a woman recovering from a breakdown moves to the country and encounters strange happenings in and around her possibly haunted new home. There's a name for this sort of thing: gaslighting. Is Our Heroine Jessica being gaslighted? Or even gaslit? Or are these weird goings-on actually, you know, real? The trouble with the film is that it plods along for more than an hour before cramming a lot of plot into the final ten or fifteen minutes. Did Jessica see a mute blonde girl or an apparition? Why are the townsfolk so rude and unwelcoming and mysterious cut about the face? (For that matter, why aren't there any women in the town?) Who is the strange newcomer Emily, who appears to be squatting in Jessica's new home when she arrives? What's Emily connection to the house or the town or literally anything else in the movie? The audience knows from the get-go that Jessica's not going crazy (again), and when her husband and friend are skeptical that she's seen what she claims to have seen...we understand. We get it. She's a little unstable, so maybe she's still on that road to recovery, right? For that first hour or so, these haunting episodes feel like they're adding up to something, as if we the audience will eventually get some (perhaps not all) answers to the questions that nag us as well as Jessica. Now, the atmosphere is appropriately off-putting, and the cast makes a fair attempt at keeping us on their side (particularly Zohra Lampert as Jessica), but the pacing is leaden and the writing one dimensional. This movie simply should have been better.
Review of Let's Scare Jessica to Death
