The Offering (2016)

This movie is also known as "The Faith Of Anna Waters" for some unknown reason like many films, one title is never enough.

Summed up....

Our heroine, Jamie, goes to Singapore after the death of her sister to investigate said grissly end. It turns out that the sister, Anna killed herself live on video and told her daughter that she would return in seven days.

Anna's ex-husband teams up with Jamie to delve into this death when it's revealed that another girl did the same killy-death-on-video thing, also claiming that she'd be back in seven days.

Then comes a secondary plot where two priests think that the Biblical Tower of Babel is going to be rebuilt and the church websites are being hacked by an unknown something.

Back in plot 1, the daughter is visited by spooky stuff (thinking it's her mum coming back) and the two detectives discover satanic marks and what seems to be a plan to bring back an ancient demon.

So we have a lot of plots and stuff going on and overlapping. Our film creator is left spinning a lot of plates and dosn't quite carry it off. There is simply too much in too short a space of time. When we do get to the crunch, it wasn't worth it really and we're left with a big bag of over-used cliches and rip-offs.

Overall the tone of this was quite good and full of promise, quite a few jumpy scares and a drag-you-in story, until it all goes to plop.

The Offering started to bring something new to the table and then just dragged it away. Maybe with a re-cut or an extended version we could get a quite decent film but as it's been released it's not amazing.

Not bad, just not amazing.

4/10 Masks