Capture (2026)
Premise: Abby, former foster child, inherits a sick ass house in Middleonowheretown, Massachusetts. Things that come with the house: a whole tiny town of people that hate you for no real reason as far as you’re concerned, some inexplicable architecture and more importantly a 199X handheld camera + tons of videotapes that will let you learn a lot about your biological parents! How could anything go wrong?
Under 90 minutes? Yeah!
Do they say the title? I… don’t think so, honestly. I might have missed it but as you may have guessed by now here at Impeccable-Taste HQ we really care about this kind of thing, so.
First thing I thought of:
Okay, more: Hoo boy, this was fun! This is very clearly a low budget movie filmed by people who both love and understand this genre and the usual tropes and failings. The camerawork (hur hur) and framing in general is really great, in the sense that it manages to make things very unsettling even though nothing bad is necessarily happen because it knows what kind of scene we have been conditioned to be wary of (“oh i bet something’s going to jump from behind her now”, etc). It has a ton of restraint, a lovely main character (I really liked Abby’s performance) and a gutpunch of an ending that made me nod. So, yeah, a very nice surprise considering I went in completely blind, on a whim, because “somebody is watching old tapes in this film” is like catnip to yours truly. I’m going to try and find more movies by the same people involved on this one, that’s for sure!
A simple way to improve it: I’d say the explanation for the whole thing feels a bit rushed, which is a pity because the movie really knows the pace it’s going for, but eeeeeh who the hell cares. Maybe drop the satanic panic angle the movie goes for, for like ten minutes.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
I guess this one is still too recent to have any IMDb trivia but mark my words, there will be some dumb as hell entry on the Goofs section going “the type of handheld cameras consumers could get in 199X did not have a landscape aspect ratio, and anytime there’s a POV shot from the camera that’s what we get, I hope somebody was fired for that blunder hur hur i’m so smart also very successful and people like -nay, love me and my interesting trivia (a million upvotes)”.
