By Trey Abel
Mr. Jones (2013)
Director: Karl Mueller
Netflix rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
“A young couple moves to the woods and soon finds their
nightmares and reality colliding.”
This suspenseful horror film starts out shot in the
"found footage" style and follows married couple Penny and Scott as
they drive through a rural desert area to a secluded cabin to work on
Scott's new idea for a nature documentary.
Soon after arriving, the film moves to a
"montage" scene where we find out through a series of flashbacks that
their relationship was rocky. To make matters worse, Scott has stopped taking
his medication and soon stops shooting the documentary entirely.
While shooting one afternoon, Scott happens to find a
cabin that belongs to mysterious artist "Mr. Jones" who is renown in
the art world for sending out scarecrow "totems" across the country. These totems have no reason or description and have captivated the art world apparently. Penny
immediately sees this as a way to salvage the documentary and things start to
get weird.
The Cinematography catches a good blend of differing
first person shots so you don't get the standard "this is what the actor
is seeing" the whole movie. Penny and Scott were both well cast and as the
movie progresses they do a great job of building the tension as the movie moves
towards a reality bending conclusion. I’m not usually a big fan of the first
person found footage style but I felt like director Karl Mueller (in his
feature debut) did a great job of using it to create some artistic shots and
keep a fresh take on a familiar genre.
The ending is definitely not going to be for everybody.
Mainly due to the fact that it gets pretty trippy and incoherent at places, but
I felt that the end, did a pretty good job of explaining itself through the
confusion. Mood wise this movie was tense, frightening, and paced very well
with a run-time of 84 minutes.
Nothing seemed to be slacking or dragged out with the
exception of a few parts towards the end. If you are looking for an excellent
quick suspenseful horror movie on Netflix this one comes with a very high
recommendation from me. Karl Mueller definitely put out and admirable first
effort and I'll be looking forward to seeing what he can do in the future.
Trey is an Omaha musician and horror fan. When not playing bass with his band Rock Paper Dynamite, he's busy working on movie reviews for us and hanging out with his cat.