Arrow Video FrightFest expands this year’s First Blood selection with the inclusion of Lair in the ‘Best of the Fest’ digital edition. The strand of programming highlights some of the best and brightest filmmakers who are early in their work in horror genre cinema. This year’s crop at the physical event demonstrated a wildly diverse, but incredibly talented, group of filmmakers. Hoping to join that same rank with their film Lair is writer and director Adam Ethan Crow.
Lair opens with paranormal investigator Steven Caramore (Corey Johnson) discovering that his friend Ben has been charged with the murder of his wife and child. Knowing that it’s very out of character, Caramore realises that an artefact he had been storing at Ben’s house may have allowed a demon into the property. Finally on the cusp of a genuine paranormal breakthrough, Caramore decides to set up a trap within a holiday home to test the potency of his other occult items. As he observes the first guests staying in the holiday home, events get out of control, putting all of them, Caramore included, in very real danger.
There are several interesting ideas posed within Lair, the problem is that they all compete for the viewer’s attention. With so many subplots, side stories, and sudden shifts in direction of the narrative, there’s a lot of noise to work through to get to the main story, and with so many distractions, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what that is. Towards the end of the film, the story suddenly jumps forward in time before flashing backwards to fill in events, which ends up confusing everything even more. The time switch is clearly a technique to prolong some story reveals, but alongside all the other jumbles, it only ends up adding further confusion.
Crow also struggles to convey naturalistic dialogue. None of the characters talk quite how real people do, but whereas most are still passable, the character of Caramore is a bit of a mess. The lines and delivery of this character’s words feel as though he belongs in a different film altogether. Pushing into eccentricity with attempts at punny one-liners, Caramore feels like a parody or caricature of several stock characters combined, the result is a horribly irritating central character. With this character saying weird and wacky lines such as, “I don’t have the time or the crayons”, and reacting to something scary with the remark, “mother of dragons!”, Caramore feels entirely fictitious and made-up as people don’t speak like this. At least not to the extent that Caramore does.
Where Lair proves its worth is with its work on the demon and horror elements. It takes until around the hour mark for any significant horror aspects to kick in, and whilst their appearance is sudden and slightly unbalancing, there is some impressive work to behold. The demon is a bundle of shapeshifting black mist that moves at the speed of light; you never quite know from where it’s going to strike. The design is reminiscent of a few creatures that we’ve seen before, but the production values are great. When combined with the gore effects, the entity is a solid entry into the genre-sphere. There are some great kills achieved, a highlight being an in-camera levitating disembowelment.
A great amount of effort has gone into bringing Lair to life. Whilst the visual effects and creature designs are strong, a muddled narrative and poor dialogue choices let Crow’s film down. The bones of the film do show some glimpses of real talent, with a little more self-editing and maturity of experience, Crow could deliver some very interesting future projects.
Lair
Summary
The gore and monster effects are remarkably impressive for such a low budget, the dialogue and plot however are not. A mixed bag of hit and miss, Lair has a lot of good ideas, it just tries to tell them all at once.
Lair was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2021.
