Found

Two brothers deal with the fallout of some found footage that their dad had stashed away in a shoebox, only finding it now, after his death.

Right from the off, in Found, we get to watch the footage that the brothers have stumbled upon in amongst their dad’s stuff. It’s brutal and graphic from the start, showing a young woman in a dimly lit basement, wearing only a nightgown on a filthy mattress, being tormented by the man behind the camera – Daddy. The performance from Hannah McGlynn as the victim is very convincing, and the rawness of the home video adds to the realness of the situation, giving a chilling aspect to the disturbing footage. Thankfully, we don’t have to stay in the basement too long, as writer/director, Thomas Elliot Griffiths, decides to give us more than just a regular found footage horror story.

Conceptualised as an idea for a filmmaker challenge centred around the theme of ‘found footage’, it’s great to see that Griffiths chose to be a little meta with his narrative and allowed his story to come away from the strict ‘in-camera POV’ that so often restricts so many films in the genre, especially seeing as it’s so short. Coming out of the basement, we then meet the two brothers (Woodward and McLaughlin) who are watching their dad carry out these atrocities, and now we get to worry about their relationship to the footage and just what it is they’re going to do about it.

This extra dimension is very helpful in standing the film out from what can be a fairly formulaic genre, and in only six-and-a-half-minutes, we get a lot of story and a double narrative to consider, along with a bunch of striking visuals and some deep themed dialogue. The real-world consequences of the brothers finding this footage are critical to the fact of its existence in the first place, and the problems that their father creates, even after his death, could follow them for generations to come. There are no easy decisions in Found, and it is not an easy watch either, testing audience boundaries with its content, while making the viewer really question what a ‘good’ decision would be in this situation.

If there is any gripe to be had, it’s that the delivery from the main leads is sub-par. Understandably, with a fifty quid budget everyone’s working with what they’ve got, and good actors are hard to come by, but the quick Scouse that runs through the lines is too much for most of us to handle, and the dialogue slips from authentic to unintelligible at times. Despite this, the production in otherwise well handled, and the whole film comes together without wasting a second of its runtime, even in the credits.

If only more things that we Found were as surprising and as satisfying as this chilling short film.