Guest Review: Afflicted (2014)

Review by Jonas Schwartz

Both the vampire and the found-footage sub-genres have gotten pretty tired as of late, but Afflicted finds a novel way to combine both conventions, stripping many of the sub-genres’ traps from the tale.

Writers/directors Derek Lee and Clif Prowse cast themselves as the two protagonists -- even using their own names – thus lending an authenticity to their relationship. Because the two ingratiate themselves to the audience, the horror they live becomes all the more harrowing.

After being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, Derek takes his best friend Clif on a European trip to end all trips. Amateur filmmakers, they document their tour through the cities, both the sightseeing and the skirt-chasing.

Wanting to forget his troubles for a night, Derek abandons Clif and their two other friends to hook up with a sexy, mysterious woman at a Paris nightclub. Pranking him, the guys dart into his bedroom to embarrass Derek only to find him bloodied and bitten.

Clif and Derek continue their trip, though Derek remains lethargic and nauseated in Italy. Derek discovers he’s not dying from his attack, he’s evolving. Derek can jump buildings and his senses have heightened. He also realizes he has a bloodlust. He chases a pig, breaks into a blood bank, and tries to find alternative nourishment, but he eventually can’t deny, he requires more blood, human blood. As Derek transforms, Clif continues to film everything, even though he is terrified for and of his best friend.

Derek’s activities become more public and the authorities consider Derek to be a dangerous sociopath. His family, confounded by his shocking behavior, hope to convince him to surrender, but Derek must return to Paris, to find the girl who first afflicted this curse on him.

Lee and Prowse take supernatural situations and ground them with logic. First, their characters are not drunk party animals out for a lay like the victims of Eli Roth’s Hostel. They’re on a noble sojourn. Because Derek is dying and all Clif wants is a once-of-a-lifetime journey for his best friend who has been robbed of his adulthood, they start off as identifiable humans.

Second, even if the plot requires certain actions, the characters’ motivations are strong enough that it makes it easy to believe they’re following their judgment as opposed to being just pawns to the story.

Derek avoids hospitals (as many clichéd victims may in these horror tales) after his attack in Paris. However he associates the hospital with his impending death and knows his time is limited. If the doctors force him to remain bed-ridden, he will have wasted his last opportunity to really live before he dies, therefore Derek’s ignoring of his pain and traveling to Italy makes common sense.

The directors film the episodes with a flair for Cinéma vérité. The first half-hour has a light energy, with squiggle chyrons announcing characters and locales. A casual observer may mistake the movie for an episode of MTV’s The Real World or a hipper Extreme Make-Over.

Setting the film in Europe adds to the foreignness of their situation. Derek’s confusion over his symptoms and his exasperation due to a lack of control of his own body is heightened because he can’t understand the local language and can’t communicate with others.

There’s a motif involving animals throughout the film, from wandering pigs in the outskirts to Derek’s feral squeaking when on the attack, thus equating Derek with his devolution into an instinctual beast.

Lee and Prowse have graduated from short films to full length with Afflicted. Their empathy for characters and ability to set up a moral structure within an outlandish world, distinguishes both as filmmakers to watch.

If you like Afflicted, rent Chronicle, one of the most gripping found footage films of the new millennium. Starring future stars Dane DeHaan (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station and TV’s Friday Night Lights), Chronicle is a brilliantly-acted and smartly shot metaphor for adolescence and the pain of morphing into someone you don’t recognize, i.e. an adult.  

Jonas Schwartz is a voting member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics, and the West Coast Critic for TheaterMania. Check out his “Jonas at the Movies” reviews at Maryland Nightlife.