The intention behind tonight’s film Mr. Jones was to make an art house horror flick, which sounded like a promising little number to me and I got immediately stuck in. I was aware of the predominantly bad reviews of the flick but went in with (hopefully) an unbiased opinion, emerging later feeling uncharacteristically non-plussed. Good? Maybe not. Great? Probably not. But if you’re a fan of the genre them read on, as it may well be your cup of tea and hey – don’t believe everything that you read.

The intention behind tonight’s film Mr. Jones was to make an art house horror flick, which sounded like a promising little number to me and I got immediately stuck in. I was aware of the predominantly bad reviews of the flick but went in with (hopefully) an unbiased opinion, emerging later feeling uncharacteristically non-plussed. Good? Maybe not. Great? Probably not. But if you’re a fan of the genre them read on, as it may well be your cup of tea and hey – don’t believe everything that you read.

In essence, Mr. Jones is a 2013 horror-slash-thriller film and the feature film directorial debut of Karl Mueller, who also wrote the screenplay. It had its world debut on April 19, 2013 at the Tribeca Film Festival and stars Jon Foster (Accidentally On Purpose, The Brotherhood) and Sarah Jones (Alcatraz) as a couple that go out to the woods to work on a film, but end up being terrorised by a series of increasingly strange events and people. So far so cliché, but with two strong actors front and centre everything was pretty promising.

Scott and Penny are a vaguely indie, arty young couple who take up residence in a cabin in the desert so Scott can pursue a vague plan to make a documentary about nature. This isn’t much of a focus though to be honest, and he spends more time sleeping than actually filming anything to point where Penny is about to lose her rag.

Then the two of them make a discovery: a creepy stick-statue that Penny identifies as the work of the mysterious “Mr. Jones,” a reclusive outsider artist famous for mailing random people samples of his eerie work. Suddenly Scott has a possible subject – and a controversial one at that – and the pair start filming and photographing in earnest. He conveniently lives very near to their cabin and they even get the courage to venture into the artist’s cavernous underground workshop while he’s away. Beautifully filmed in true art house style, Mueller gives us a fairly frightening suspense sequence at that point, with lots of moving shadows and narrow escapes—all made more effective by the beauty and clarity of the images in the scenes leading up to it. But immediately after that the film goes into full meltdown mode, with far too much “shaky face shot,” “shaky first-person shot,” “shaky, worried face shot,” and so on, for it to really keep your attention. In fact, I just got bloody annoyed.

While filming, Mueller said that he was deeply inspired by director David Lynch and the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and wanted to design the film's soundtrack to "make it feel like you’re under water, or in somebody’s head and they have a bad cold”. I don’t know about that as I was too busy getting a bad headache from all of the crazy camera work, and I just wanted it to stop.

So much promise and loved by some, this is a film you have to see to make your mind up about.

Screening Times:
04/03/2015 08:30pm
08/03/2015 09:30pm
03/04/2015 03:40pm
13/04/2015 05:00pm