Found Footage Fandom: The Medium (2021)

 Written By: Danny Albers 

ATTENTION: If you haven’t seen the film, go and watch it and come back to the article. 

My Synopsis (SPOILER ALERT) 

It’s common that a found footage film has a bit of a slow burn. The Medium took slow burn, and then took it to a level of insanity, absurdity, and madness that you wouldn’t expect consuming the first 5-10 minutes of the film. The movie begins with a film crew talking to an older woman who appears to be a spiritual doctor for a small village in Asia. Her name is Nim, and she explains that a spirit of a deity named Ba Yan possessed her to give her these powers. This happened when her older sister rejected this spirit and converted to Christianity. Nim has a niece who’s beginning to experience some strange things. Some believe this is the spirit of Ba Yan leaving Nim and moving onto her niece Mink. Mink is having her period daily, and experiencing emotional outbursts of anger and sexual aggressiveness. So the town, concerned for Mink, goes around Nim to give Mink an acceptance ceremony because Nim refuses. Nim, outraged by this, reveals she believes that it’s multiple evil spirits trying to possess Mink. After the ceremony, Mink disappears. The concerned family, learning from a higher spiritual power who is experienced in exorcisms, says that Mink is possessed by murdered victims of Nim’s fathers ancestor. And she’s also cursed because of her mother rejecting Ba Yan. So the family capture Mink, and work to hold her in captivity after multiple members of the family die from strange causes. One of the family members releases Mink after being tricked that Mink was harming a baby, and this causes the acceptance ceremony of her mother to take on Ba Yan go wrong. The spirits take control of all of the men performing the ceremony, and they all are killed along with the camera crew, a traditional ending to a found footage film. 

Review 

What makes a found footage film work is jump scares and an easy storyline to follow. Although The Medium has some creepy and gross moments, I hardly found any moment of the film very scary. In fact, a lot of the film is ridiculous. It clearly is well shot, so it’s not from a small production. But the movie is really poorly written. There are a lot of foreign spirits and practices with little background. Instead of Ba Yan, there is really no explanation beside the opening sequence. The ending was a little strange the way they did the whole breakdown from the ceremony. One minute you're trying to figure out what’s going on in this ceremony, and the next, people are running around killing each other. Also, you kill Nim, the main character, without explanation or reason. That is something that will doom any film. Long story short, the film is boring, and that makes it hard to follow because it is a long movie. Worth watching, but nowhere near any of my top 10 found footage movies.

Danny’s Grade: 4.7/10