Children of Sorrow Review
by Nav Qateel
Movies released by After Dark can be a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, but on the whole they provide a moderate amount of entertainment with their horror films. The last one I caught was a few months back, a horror titled, Ritual, which was a mediocre effort, yet was superior to Children of Sorrow. A found-footage tale of cult indoctrination by a charismatic leader called Simon Leach, Children of Sorrow comes to us from Jourdan McClure, in this, his second film.
Written by Ryan Finnerty, Children of Sorrow is an attempt at showing what it’s like to be suckered into a religious cult led by a nut, Father Simon, (played by the unbelievably busy Bill Oberst Jr., who has an incredible 28 titles in various stages of production at the time of writing), then how they become brainwashed into doing the unthinkable to themselves and each other.
A young woman, Ellen (Hannah Levien), lives in London and now must travel to Mexico to locate her missing sister. The sister’s last contact with Ellen had been to tell her how she had found herself — with the help of Father Simon — and that she’d never been happier. Soon, all contact is lost and now Ellen pretends to join Simon’s cult in the hope of locating her sister. After arriving at the cult, Ellen gets a taste of Simon’s brainwashing bag of tricks, typically used by these conmen to get the gullible to do their bidding.
- Children of Sorrow
- Directed by
Jourdan McClure - Cast
Bill Oberst Jr., Hannah Levien, Whitney Nielsen - Release Date
4 March 2014 - Nav’s Grade: C-
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Simon claims to offer spiritual help and enlightenment, but as the weeks go by we discover he has a more sinister plan for his hapless followers. All his promises of a better afterlife and how he only wants what’s best for them, are hollow words. Simon wants to sacrifice these vulnerable young people in a ritual he calls the “transition,” which is nothing more than brutal slaughter.
Children of Sorrow is initially about Ellen’s hunt for answers to her sister’s disappearance but eventually this seems to be forgotten and we then focus on Simon and the manipulation of his followers. This could have been more interesting, watching the way Simon went about breaking these young people and wearing down their resistance, but I just didn’t find it authentic enough. Bill Oberst Jr’s performance was one of the highlights of the film, along with the last 20-minutes. But beyond that, I wasn’t all that impressed.
The camera-shake was pretty bad and took me right out of the film much of the time. I don’t understand why directors insist on so much movement when employing this format. Don’t they know that not everyone is that incompetent with camcorders and many folks could easily keep a hand-held camera steady? Then there was the fact we had to wait for over an hour to get something satisfying to watch, which won’t please your average horror fan who’ll expect something a lot sooner than that. Don’t get me wrong, when it does come it’s pretty decent, however, it felt too late to rescue me from boredom.
If you can wait on a horror-film revealing its horror in the final 20-minutes then you will be rewarded with a savage finish. The performances leading up to the big finale were certainly good for a low-budget indie, but I found the story weak and the pacing too slow for my taste. It is worth watching if you have an abundance of patience. Sadly, I don’t.
