People rank Emesis Blue highly because it's the first full-length Source Filmmaker movie with striking visuals and a gritty, dark atmosphere, which is a welcome breath of fresh air from the comedy-oriented, short-form animations usually produced by the Team Fortress 2 community.
That said, I'm not here to review it as a TF2 SFM movie, I'm here to review it as a movie. And as a movie, it feels incredibly confused, meandering and incoherent.
The plot is very hard to follow, constantly introducing new concepts and characters with no time to flesh anything out. Between hallucinations, people being resurrected and hints at time-travel, you'll have absolutely no idea what's going on by the end of it. Tons of key details are deliberately cryptic, vague and "open to interpretation" - at times, making it feel less like a story and more like an alternate reality game (ARG), with its layers upon layers of obtuseness. This is a red flag for me, as making your narrative unnecessarily convoluted is one of the best ways to mask its lack of merit.
That said, what frustrates me even more is how the film sidelines its own, original ideas just to cram itself full of references. Hans Becker's 1931 film "M" is a running theme and presumably plot-significant. There are constant, blatant allusions to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", with some scenes being shot-for-shot recreations, and one of the monsters is basically Tyrant from the "Resident Evil 2" remake. At this point, I can't be sure if any of this movie's cool moments are original, or just pinched from some other game or film I haven't seen yet.
When these references are not important to the plot or themes, they feel like pointless, shallow pandering - almost as if the author is desperately trying to prove they're a "true horror fan" by pointing to all the horror games and films they know. When the references ARE important, it feels frustrating that we're expected to do homework before we can get a basic idea of what's happening (no, I'm not watching "M" just to decrypt Dr. Ludwig's character). A good story should stand on its own legs and convey its own meaning without the need to constantly invoke ideas from other authors. It's fine to be inspired by things you like, but intertextuality does not replace substance.
And ultimately, I don't see the substance. I look back and don't remember feeling particularly invested in the characters, themes or plot. The biggest takeaway I had was "it was a very pretty, full-length horror film made in SFM with the TF2 characters", and it seems that everyone else is way too impressed with that to question the rest of its creative decisions.
I mean, just contrast this with other surreal horror films like "Skinamarink" or "Funny Games", and the difference is night and day. "Skinamarink" is very sensory, focusing on a simple core idea (2 kids trapped in a house being tortured by an omnipotent demon) and trying to make it as tense and unsettling as possible by slowly escalating the weirdness and brutality. "Funny Games", on the other hand, uses its surrealism to explore horror tropes and question why audiences are invested in the struggle between victim and killer, breaking the 4th wall to point out how arbitrarily filmmakers set the rules of such conflicts.
With that frame of reference, Emesis Blue is just a mess in comparison. Its imagery doesn't feel deliberate or poignant, and more like it's trying to overwhelm the audience with as many shocking twists and turns as possible in an attempt to confuse them, making them THINK there's some larger picture they're missing.
So yeah, I'm sorry. As a technical achievement for SFM, it's amazing, but as a horror story, it's just bad.
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