‘The Harbinger’ is a horror film that follows the Snyder family, - Daniel and Theresa and their daughter Rosalie. The parents decide to move their troubled daughter to a small town, seeking help for her mysterious condition. Odd things start to happen around town as their neighbours die off one by one under mysterious circumstances, indicating that a dark presence has followed the Snyder's to the small town.
The film offers the standard fare in terms of the opening for a horror feature, - there is a troubled child whose issues stem from an ominous pact with a dark force and we witness the parents try to deal with the fallout of the mysterious pact.
After the Snyder’s settle in the new town, the film begins to lose the simple and straightforward premise it had established, i.e. Daniel trying to figure out a way to save his daughters soul by visiting with a Native American healer. Here the film begins a barrage of the introduction of new elements and concepts to the story, such as another mysterious evil-doer besides the task that Daniel is to carry out in the town; flashbacks to the past showing the Snyder’s in a never-ending cycle of collecting innocent souls; the feud between the Devil and the first inhabitants of the land, etc.
With the introduction of a variety of new ideas, ‘The Harbinger’ seems to lose focus and devalues the core of the story, with each new addition detracting from our interest in Rosalie’s well-being and bloating the feature length to just under 2 hours, making it a challenge to sit through.
The stand out performance of the feature has to be Will Klipstine, the writer/director of the feature who portrays Daniel. The portrayal is stand-out if only due to the fact that Klipstine is the one we spend most time with. At times delivering very erratic and seemingly out of tone exclamations, Klipstine seems to evoke a semblance of a Nic Cage off-the wall performance, resulting in a mixed energy to the film and the character’s motivations.
‘The Harbinger’ is a mixed bag of cliched horror story threads, as by the end of the film, the movie has walked itself through a sort of horror film checklist, marking off an embarrassment of predictable and played-out horror tropes. By failing to establish a strong emotional connection to any of the characters, ‘The Harbinger’ just sort of moves along, trying to hit as many horror film marks as possible, eventually delivering a mishmash of loosely interrelated threads, evoking little excitement and hardly any scares.
Score: 1/4
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