Review: The Upper Footage

12th October 2014

**THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS**

The room was dark, my phone was off, the movie was set and I placed my headphones on and began my experience with ‘The Upper Footage’. 90 minutes later after following the rules I felt well, disappointed. It was a first for me as you don’t usually get set a bunch of rules by the movie’s promoters on viewing their product, although it felt a little unneeded. With a set of rules that include using headphones and watching it at night; I expected jump scares, eerie noises and unsettling footage but this movie has none of that. I can only think that the whole viewing rules were pointless, they’d have been better not saying anything to try and set the mood just let people watch it in their own way and not trying to sell it as a horror; Which it is not.

‘The Upper Footage’ is dubbed as a one of a kind movie experience which is they edited version of 393 minutes of recovered footage depicting the death and cover up of a girl called Jackie Spearo by a group of NYC socialites. As a premise that’s great and sounds like it will contain some disturbing footage and horrific things that must have happened to this girl before her untimely demise. It begins by telling the story of the footage, how it first came to light on YouTube where it blurred people’s faces and was simply called ‘NYC Socialite Overdose’ several short clips were released and later pulled by YouTube; Leading to news outlets questioning the authenticity of the clips and a supposed involvement of several big Hollywood players, including Quentin Tarantino. This is all done to add validity to the footage which to begin with works although this later falls apart in a big way. The pacing slows and the escalation is so erratic it feels ridiculous, and the performances which start off great begin to become strained and unconvincing. The scripting is actually really well done, it’s unclear whether it was improved or not but that may explain things later on and honestly the performances on the whole are very good until the last 20 minutes.

The camera work here is actually really good in the beginning where the camera movement feels natural, shots are poorly framed and the camera becomes a prop in the vlogger Will’s efforts to seduce girls in the back of a limo. It feels realistic here, like its a 20 something trying to document an evening of partying, Hell I’ve shot bits like this on my phone. Jackie’s face is pixelated throughout adding to the illusion of authenticity. Then when things get more serious, everything falls apart. The regular stumbling block of all found footage movie comes in the form of the ‘why are you filming this?’ hurdle which they attempt to solve by playing it off as them all being too wasted to remember things and they would all need to have straight stories for the police; So they film the whole night with the plan to watch it the following day to make sure they all had the same string of events. What felt natural to begin with disappears and we’re left with many shots of the back of chairs, blurry floors and we rely on audio of mainly panicked socialites where not one of them seems to act rationally. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing that shit. I’ve seen friends in near fatal scenarios after nights of revelry and sure as shit it sobers you up fast, things are heightened but you act at least in some way rationally. Are socialites so lacking in common sense that they naturally assume the whole world has ended the second something goes south?

If you’re still reading at this point you’ve probably come to the conclusion that I hated this film and that’s actually not the case. It does a good job mostly, the premise is great and the 3 year marketing campaign is brilliant although it took so long to get released that now even a cursory Google search will reveal it’s falseness. Had the movie been released at the height of the buzz it would have made a much bigger impact and the fact that the marketing manages to still make you question if the events could actually happen; It blurs the line between fiction and reality just enough. That is where this movie’s brilliance lies, it isn’t a horror, it isn’t quite real; but it does make you scrutinise the media and the celebrity culture and for that reason you should watch this movie. The movie is available on VOD right now.

6/10

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