Panic Fest Film Festival Coverage
Worlds review.
A faux documentary about a strange man and the even stranger thing that happened to him.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Worlds
Directed by Chris Hammarberg
Written by Chris Hammarberg
Starring Lorenzo Beronilla, Savannah Whitten, Nikki Neurohr, John R. Smith Jnr, Mike Mitchell Jr. and Noriko Sato
Worlds Review
Faux true crime (faux crime?) movies have become a regular staple of the found footage subgenre. It makes sense. Limited resources don’t prevent talking heads interviews intercut with voyeuristic imagery. Many recent releases have taken the resources they have access to and created what some may consider to be extended Unsolved Mysteries segments with them. If this sounds familiar…thank you for reading our recent reviews! I don’t mean to sound repetitive but the number of similarly schemed independent productions that we’ve seen of late makes it inevitable.
None of this is to say that the concept is without merit. The found footage/faux crime examination films often end up being surprisingly effective little chillers made on a budget. There’s true creativity to be found within the format. For one thing…producing a documentary feel around found footage segments helps make the entire package feel real. It allows the footage to compliment the realism instead of carrying it. A solid work around to found footage fatigue.
Worlds is one such film. It has an admittedly slight central concept…one that it hopes to sell by building a package around it that fans of true crime mysteries will find compelling. Worlds (Nick Dailey) is the nickname of a strange man glimpsed by a group of friends. They create a game of sorts…alerting the others of times they find him out in the wild. He starts off an unassuming character…seemingly aloof to the world around him. He spends his days staring into the sky and jotting down symbols inside of his journal.
The first act of Worlds involves discussion of the Worlds phenomenon. The friends begin to worry about how often they’re seeing the strange man around town. He appears to be creeping closer to them. It’s hard to blame him…to be honest. The group doesn’t come across as the most compassionate people. They’ve literally made a game out of seeing a man who seems to need mental help…uploading videos about him to the internet. Morgan (Nikki Neurohr) sees him the most often…coming closer and closer to her (for lack of a better word) world.
Things really hit the fan when Worlds shows up at Morgan’s home. A police officer chases him off. Seemingly. The group decides they’ll stop playing their game. The decision is hardly necessary, however. Worlds is soon found dead on the side of the road…missing his head. As far as mystery hooks go, Worlds has a good one. What has Worlds been looking at? What is he writing in his journal? How did he die? Where is his head?
As we approach the second half of the story the movie has armed itself with enough interesting ideas to pay off by the end. This is when the movie begins to struggle. Unsolved mysteries are such for good reason. Unfortunately, there’s no Robert Stack surrogate popping up post-credits to provide an update.
What we do get are hints. A writer takes up an investigation into Worlds’ death. This involves a bit of rehashing Morgan’s story and the videos from the first act of the story. We get the sense that the police officer is hiding something, and it delves deeper into the symbols that Worlds was scrawling in his notebook. The only real answers we get, however, involve the case of a new character who begins to dream in the same language Worlds was writing in. It’s a disappointment to open so many doors without a concrete plan of what will be on the other side.
But Worlds doesn’t need answers to succeed at what it is intending. It isn’t there to solve a mystery…it’s there to present an unsolved one. With a full commitment to the idea…Worlds plays out like an intriguing piece of pulp for fans of the mystery genre. It may end up a bit frustrating…but isn’t that the whole point of an unsolved mystery? To intrigue, unsettle and leave one to wonder?
Scare Value
It may sound like a back handed compliment to say that Worlds gets a lot of very little. It’s a genuine one. There is a simple idea at the core. What makes it interesting is the way the movie presents it. Those in need of easy answers may be frustrated when they fail to arrive. Fans of mysteries and true crime documentaries will find a familiar format with open ended possibilities.
