The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan (2018)

Premise: Leah Sullivan wants to film a documentary for uni, for Found Footage 101 I suppose, and that of course means she’ll travel back to her hometown to investigate this unsolved mystery where a whole family was killed in a really gruesome fashion. Like five minutes in, a cop stops her because she almost drives over some Karen’s poodle (the only bad kind of dog, and I know it’s a poodle even if you don’t see it), and the cop immediately proceeds to ignore that and just like, invite her for coffee and all that. There might be some social commentary there but let’s ignore that and focus on the spooky stuff.

Under 90 minutes? Yeah!
Do they say the title? No, but it would have been amazing if they had managed to drop that. “Haha, imagine if we died here and all this would become The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan, lol”

First thing I thought of:

Okay, more: Charmingly low budget, this movie won me by having a “hidden ghost” (hiding a ghost?) in one of the first scenes, and managing to make me squint at the background for the whole runtime. Nicely played, specially because even though it’s one of those extremely cheesy, extremely simple little tricks (just… have someone just-slightly-out-of-focus in the background?) it was very tastefully done. And yeah you might think “why is my favourite blog, Impeccable-TasteDotCom, focusing so much on this?”. The answer is that I am sometimes very very easy to please. That and it was fun, the characters were kinda cute (even when the actors might feel a bit amateurish at times), the little conversations felt fun and yah. Once again, a fun time at the movies….

A simple way to improve it: I know it’s kind of the expected trope with the genre but I’d really love if found footage movies didn’t go for “the last five minutes of the movie are almost pitch black with some jumpscares” all the time. That and seriously, if you know you’re going to pay a visit to a murderhouse you should not get your AliExpress torchlight and instead get a good one even if it is one euro more expensive.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

So I didn’t read this on the trivia itself but if you check the actors’ names and bios you’ll find out that this is not just charmingly low budget, it’s also one of those times where the movie was written by the two main actors, who happen to be husband and wife, and there’s at least one relative who also plays a part, and yeah this is kind of like “let’s film a movie, i’ll call my aunt”. I genuinely love that and will always find it a good choice.