
For its first few minutes, this comes on like a standard true crime documentary: establishing shots of the Greater Los Angeles area, talking heads introduce themselves as police officers and friends of the victims, and we zoom in on a handwritten list of names until one particular name fills the screen. All the tricks of the trade are here, and director Stuart Ortiz plays things more or less straight. In fact it’s a mockumentary: not a parody but instead a horror movie that happens to be told using the format of a true crime documentary.
The story, about a masked killer called Mr Shiny (if you think this name strains credibility, don’t forget there are real serial killers nicknamed the Happy Face Killer, the Dating Game Killer and the Doodler), is functional enough. There are lurid details of the killings, and police officers talking about how the crimes were beyond belief; there are taunting notes from the murderer; passages where the trail goes cold; moments when the police nearly catch Mr Shiny, only for him to slip through their fingers.
It’s a reminder of how comfortingly familiar these tropes have become, and because this is fiction, the moral questions triggered by actual true crime films are at a slight remove; there’s no need to ask whether the victims’ families are being properly respected here.
The only area in which Strange Harvest is a little disappointing is in its practical effects – the prosthetics and gore work. Everything else looks exactly as it should, but the footage and photographs of the bodies lack the same precise verisimilitude. This wouldn’t matter in a straightforward goofy horror movie, but here it leaps out as clunky and fake.
Indeed, if you didn’t know that you were watching fiction, it would be your first real clue. The rest of the re-creation is highly convincing – not least in the casting. Everyone here looks and acts exactly like the character type they are playing. There are no implausibly prettified police officers, or serial killers out of Vanity Fair’s Rising Stars page.
Ignore the film’s marketing, which seems intent on positioning it as a run-of-the-mill masked maniac movie; this is a fascinating and neatly realised horror riff on the 2020s’ most popular genre.
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