James Cullen Bressack has succeeded in creating a disturbing and downright shocking home invasion film. It begins with a family celebrating their youngest child’s birthday in their new home, with the father recording everything on his camera. No time is wasted, however, as the intruders break into the house no more than five minutes into the film and then the viewers are subjected to the extremity a hate crime can achieve.
What’s so great about this film is that it adds a new twist to the found footage sub-genre by having the antagonist film the majority of the events taking place. Since we’re seeing everything from the villain’s point of view, we don’t find out anything about the family that are being terrorised other than their Jewish heritage. This is similar to real-life hate crimes, as the perpetrators often don’t care about who the victims are, they’re just enraged at their religion, sexuality, race etc. Bressack definitely demonstrates this in a brutal and fascinating way.
The intruders are without a doubt the highlight of the film. Named ONE, TWO and THREE, they are over-dramatic malicious neo-Nazis who are definitely amateurs at performing their hate crimes. Throughout the film, they are high on cocaine, which just adds to their unruly nature and allows them to obliterate the family with no consequence. Instead of just breaking into their house and killing them, they decide to torture the family of five in numerous sordid ways which means there are scenes of incest, rape, gore and extreme violence. Definitely not a film for the faint-hearted.
Even though this film is only just over an hour long, every scene is filled with attention-grabbing dialogue and remarkable acting, especially as most of the actors are fairly new to the industry. This may seem like a small time torture porn film, but there is a strong message and it will leave the audience stunned and thinking about it for days.
