WARNING! This post contains extensive spoilers for this movie. Watch the movie before reading! Or don't. You have been warned.
Leaving D.C. (2012)
Unrated
IMDB Says: “After 20 years of living in Washington, D.C., Mark Klein seeks much-needed solace by moving to the remote wilds of West Virginia.”
IMDB Rating: 6.1/10
Metacritic Rating: N/A
Rotten Tomatoes: N/A critics, 80% audience
Solee: 4/5
Mikey: 2.5/5
We watched this on Amazon Prime.
Solee: I don’t have to ask why you chose this movie. I KNOW what you were looking for! Was there more to it than the “found footage” element?
Mikey: There was one other thing - a ghost! I looked up the “13 best found footage movies on Netflix”. And this movie was not one of them (in part because it’s not on Netflix). But in the comments, someone mentioned it and I was surprised to see its high rating on IMDB. And here’s a secret: one of my absolute favorite found footage movies is
Resolution - I even made you watch it with me after I reviewed it in 2013. And this sounded similar, with the story of a guy moving out into the woods to be alone before encountering weird things. It’s quite different, however.
Solee: So the big question with found footage movies is how do they handle the motivation behind creating the footage. This movie has the main character making video blogs to share with his OCD support group buddies back in DC. What did you think of that angle?
Mikey: It’s kind of dumb, I suppose, but I didn’t even give it a moment’s thought. I just bought in from the first moment and never even considered the issue. Which is certainly unique in found footage. One thing that completely sold this movie was the performance. The main character is unbelievably real, and not in the usual way a movie character can be. His behavior is really blah and dull, and he makes mistakes, and points out things that aren’t worth talking about, and all kinds of things that just show he is a truly real person. This is indistinguishable from real video footage. I know any number of people who could be the guy in this movie. It’s oscar-worthy how much this guy managed to be uninteresting!
Solee: There was an almost ignored secondary story in this found footage that I found more unsettling than the largely unsatisfying ghost story here. Mark sends some private videos to another support group member named Claire. At first it seems like they are good buds or maybe even romantically entangled. Then she arrives for her visit and it becomes VERY clear that this guy is delusional about the nature of their relationship. As a woman, I had a very visceral reaction to the situation this woman was in. Between his creepy “jokes” when she was actually in the house and his explosive reaction to finding out she was in a romantic relationship with someone else … there was a very real-world terror creating an undercurrent to the supernatural story. IN FACT. It’s just hitting me now that they put way more care and attention into weaving that story together than they did with the surface story. Interesting.
Mikey: I keep trying to respond to what you’re saying but I have to stop myself. I can’t say another word until I address the Gigantasaur in the room. This movie is one hour and sixteen minutes long. That’s real short. Which means there’s no excuse for the fact that it cuts off abruptly right when things really get going. There is no ending, there is no
Resolution, every single thing is completely left hanging. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I think it’s very important that our readers know this aspect of it, because once the movie’s over, it’s all we can really think about.
Solee: Yes. That is a crazy and noteworthy thing. And I don’t even know what to say about it because I do NOT understand why it happened.
Mikey: So with that said, I was noticing how that story is also completely left hanging. They really set up a conflict there, and some real worries about how he was going to act in the future. In fact, the threat of the ghost leading to him getting a gun, combined with his rage at (what is quite possibly not) a new romantic relationship for her, can easily come together into a big finish. You have to wonder if they ran out of money, or lost some footage, or what. We have these huge hanging threads of plot, all set to go somewhere… and nothing. And by the way, I loved how he had a completely different face in the private videos than the public ones. That’s scary too. On the one hand I was almost annoyed at how he seemed so mildly perturbed by this nightly haunting, but it turns out he was actually cracking up. He was just faking for the camera, as you find out when you see the private video.
Solee: WAIT. Are you saying he never believed the haunting aspect at all? That it was all for the benefit of his DC friends? That’s how he was luring them out to visit him … by making them worry about his safety and/or sanity??
Mikey: Oh no no no. I thought the ghost was real. I just felt like he didn’t have much reaction to it (which again was very realistic, I thought, instead of the frantic screaming). But he was cracking up in the private video. I really like your idea much better. Turn this whole thing around and it really really starts to get weird. He could totally have made those strangely-timed pictures, he showed us evidence he had the tools and probably the skills to do so.
Solee: Having finally clued into the fact that this was a movie about toxic masculinity disguised as a ghost movie, the ending makes a lot more sense. Just like you said … the real terror is not knowing how all these elements are going to come together. We didn’t meet Claire for very long, but what we did see from her is that she’s tried to be kind to this guy who refuses to acknowledge the social cues she’s putting out quite strongly. I legit almost want to watch it again with this idea in mind to see how things look different through this lens.
Mikey: I would just end up mad when it didn’t end again. But yeah, it is interesting to put it together. The relationship issues otherwise are such a small part of the movie, maybe 5 minutes or so of the runtime, and they just kind of vanish. The video where he flips out about her holding hands with a guy really kind of flips the movie on its head. He’s creepy, but then he gets aggressive and nasty. And then of course back to the public videos where he is calm and collected (but also drinking himself into a stupor). I’m so curious what the intent is now. Surely they didn’t intend to end where they did though, right? They wouldn’t do that to me.
Solee: I think it was a very conscious decision to end like that. I don’t know what the reasoning behind that decision was, but it was there. The camera goes floating up at a point when we supposedly know that he’s not in the room, so it would seem to be confirmation that there IS a ghost. I was honestly too focused on the fact that there was a drunk guy whose meds weren’t working running around in the dark with a gun. That’s a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.
Mikey: And then that gets into the gun control issue. Not overtly addressed in the movie, but wow, what an indirect argument for gun control. He is scared there’s a ghost, so he goes and buys a gun (no waiting period!), and then he doesn’t really use the gun… until he gets drunk, at which point he thinks it’s a great idea to run into the woods and shoot wildly. Yep, much safer now. As is the world.
Solee: If only ALL the people were armed at ALL the times, we’d have world peace. [/soapbox]
Mikey: (just for clarity that was a /sarcastic /soapbox, since some insane people actually make that argument)
Solee: Yes. Good to clarify. It’s a mad, mad world. *sigh* SO …
Mikey: So I want to make sure to get in here a moment to say the reason I was so upset that it ended abruptly (and far too soon) is that I was absolutely invested in this movie. It was fascinating and compelling. Which is funny, because if you tried to describe it, it’d be totally boring. About 25% of the movie consists of looking at a screen of sound-editing software as he scrolls through a sound file looking for peaks and then pointing out “Nope, that’s just a fox”. But in practice, it’s so incredibly real and banal in a way that just makes it suck you right in. This is your uncle sharing his potential ghost story with you. Your creepy uncle, it turns out. So this movie was both boring and fascinating. It was magical.
Solee: I told you this during the movie, but listening to the sound files with him was the most anxious and jumpy I’ve felt all month. It’s unexplainable because it shouldn’t have been scary at all … but when he heard that chop-chop and the voice … yeah, I was scared. I think I was completely immersed in it as if *I* had been the one to make that recording. As if this were *my* backyard we were listening to. I’m not sure how they managed to do it, but it was GOOD.
Mikey: Yes, that reality was so overwhelming. Kind of like watching Bob Ross paint, in a way. I don’t know why I made that analogy, but it’s accurate. If this movie had wrapped up the story in even a mildly clever way, 5/5 all the way. Speaking of clever, when he started getting into the later audio, and how it synced up time-wise with earlier audio, I was so convinced he was going to build up an audio track piece by piece, out of order, to form the events of a past night. That could’ve been amazing. Instead that kinda went nowhere like so much else.
Solee: OOOH! That would have been cool. They really had a nice backstory to play with but they completely abandoned it. Same with the police officer who didn’t care about the stolen camera. There were things that could have been done there to ramp up tension and what-not. Instead he was just a crappy cop. I want to address the fact that City Folk always seem to think of the country as peaceful and quiet. Not true! It’s just noisy in a different way.
Mikey: A better way. Which leads me to an important fact about us: We lived for 7(?) years in Anza, California. Dead middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but meth labs, coyotes, and high desert scrub brush. That is a key part of why this movie was so effective for us. I identified so much with being all alone in the middle of nowhere, wondering if somebody was sneaking into my yard and doing something, and knowing there was really nothing I could do if they did (I can call the cops, but how long will they take?). This hit very close to home. I’ve had nights where I was woken by a weird noise and laid awake wondering what it could be, all bad thoughts. In fact, the screaming animal noise he didn’t recognize in the movie reminded me of the horrible sound of a rabbit screaming as one of our dogs killed it. We found that out the next morning when our garage door was literally splattered with blood. Speaking of horror.
Solee: I’m amused by the fact that you started that paragraph by saying it was better than living in the city. I agree with you … I’m just not sure you’re selling it to the masses at this point. I definitely prefer the disruption of rabbits and foxes and crows at 6am over constant traffic and the chaotic energy of unhappy people around me all the time.
Mikey: Yes, the weird screams aren’t the better noise. The crickets and stuff that made his “silence” register very loud on his audio file are the good noise of the wilderness.
Solee: Which goes back to my original point that those are sounds that City Folk find a little unsettling when they land in the country for the first time. The sounds we find comforting and soothing are eerie if you’ve always lived where people noises cover them up. I guess I’m ready to rate if you are.
Mikey: I have one thing to say, but I think it’s part of my rating comments, so you rate first today!
Solee: Ok … well … ugh. This one is HARD. It was so good at the deeper stuff that most movies fail. But it completely dropped the ball with the surface story, which ended up distracting significantly from the important bits. I really want to give it a 5, but I’m going to give it a 4. That ending, man. Not cool. Not at barely over an hour. They had time to flesh things out and they didn’t. Sad.
Mikey: Okay. What I want to add is that there were a lot of questions they brought up as the movie went along, and left completely hanging by the non-ending: the sounds, the flute, the girl and her father, the picture of the cat with the note, the skull (obviously the same cat…), and others I’m forgetting. These are clues which should’ve come to fruition in some way. Without a resolution, those are just junk. And that, in the end, crushes my rating of this movie. I think this is an absolutely amazing first hour of a movie, it just needed the other hour to wrap it up. Tie together the sexual harassment and the ghost. All the ghostly clues. Make a story, not just random footage. That, in the end, drags this easy 5 all the way down… to a 2.5.
Solee: OOHHHH, SNAP.
Mikey: It’s just not worth watching knowing that you will be left frustrated.
Solee: Wow. I see what you’re saying. Not disagreeing, but kinda shocked! I like it when you surprise me with your ratings! I feel a little like I was giving them too much leeway, but I don’t think I feel quite as betrayed as you.
Mikey: Well, I can see your side. If we were having fun for the whole runtime right up until the power went out or whatever it is happened to cut it short, then it’s good. But I am left with the sour note of unresolved issues. And that stain will never be cleaned from my soul. I will die not knowing whether he got decapitated with an axe or not. Punishment is warranted.
Solee: Ah … there’s the difference. I’ve already decided that the ghost got him and gave him his comeuppance. Claire is safe with her new beau and that’s all I’m really worried about.
Mikey: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CAT!?!?! Let’s just watch another movie.
Solee: Okay. How about
Haunted Mansion (2015, not the Disney movie)?
Mikey: It better have an ending.
