The Conspiracy (2012)

The Conspiracy is a mockumentary/found-footage horror film from 2012, a direct result of the big boom of such films following on from Paranormal Activity, at about the point when the sub-genre was being driven into the dirt by awful sequels and copycats. It's fairly obscure at the moment, seemingly existing only as a Shudder streaming exclusive, having only ever seen a long out-of-print DVD release over a decade ago and various foreign Blu-ray releases in the years since. But hey: the same is true for Noroi: The Curse, and that was one of the best found-footage films I'd ever seen, before or since. Could The Conspiracy ever hope to measure up to those lofty expectations? 

Well no, you idiot, but I'm not going in with those expectations. I just want grounded horror with a shallow depth of field. I want mystery, ambiguity, more of what The Blair Witch Project and The Last Broadcast offered up, and the premise for this film seemed promising as such: two documentary filmmakers are doing a piece on conspiracy theories and theorists centered around Terrance G, your typical Alex Jones type in all ways except his attitude, demeanor, personality... alright, so not very much like him at all, but he yells at people with a megaphone while they're just trying to go about their day about 'the man,' so still pretty close. In general, they tried to make this guy likable, down to earth, and earnest in a way Jones has never been in spitting distance of. In other words, he's a movie character, but that's hardly a complaint. 

It's a good thing that this character makes such an intriguing impression because it's not long before he's disappeared, leaving behind only a ransacked apartment and few clues to his current whereabouts. While investigating, our two leads discover a pattern in what Terrance G. was looking into that could lead to evidence of a genuine NWO, and are soon put into contact with a man who may know what happened to Terry, and in fact, may even know about whoever has been following around our intrepid video journalists ever since his disappearance...

It's an interesting premise, really. It helps that in the first fifteen or twenty minutes, it's very easy to forget that you're not watching a real documentary about crazy conspiracy theorists. They use enough real footage of world leaders and authentic doomsayer talking points as to make everything feel quite legitimate, and the acting in all the faked interviews and from Terrance G. himself ain't half bad. This all sets up a killer second act, where things get decidedly fictional and it becomes an outright horror film, maybe even folk horror. I couldn't wait. Only it wasn't long before I began to see the film's potential wither away to nothing before my very eyes.

Remember The Scary of Sixty-First? That film was hard to parse, for sure. Its creators are apparently genuine believers in conspiracy theories such as the ones poked fun at here, and yet they self-consciously poked fun at their own talking points and the behavior of the crazies they apparently count among their numbers. Despite their convictions and beliefs, they're apparently able to distance themselves from it enough to deliver something... well, if not good at least interesting. I find myself thinking back on that film quite fondly, in fact, while watching this poor excuse for a conspiracy flick, where everything is taken deadly seriously and the ideas aren't very interesting or original. In my review for The Scary... I think I made a point of saying that Stanley Kubrick did it better with Eyes Wide Shut, which looking back on it seems kind of unfair (though The Scary did go out of its way to reference that film visually, spiritually, and even, occasionally, in the script itself.) But this film? Holy god. Talk about a downgrade. And The Scary... didn't try and attempt a lavish ball at a fancy estate the way The Conspiracy does, and certainly didn't shoot it with a dirty GoPro. And despite how little taste The Scary... displayed, it never, without warning, popped real 9/11 footage onto the screen for shock value, so there's that. Or, for that matter, did they ever show actual footage of an assassination? Grainy, hard-to-parse footage, yes, and footage most people have already seen, but real footage of a man's head exploding nonetheless.

I like the folk horror angle in theory, I really do, but in the context of the film, it comes off more like a ripoff of The Most Dangerous Game with the look of the ritual scene in Kill List, which came out only a year prior. The lore isn't examined in depth at all, and the ritual itself wasn't very interesting, unique... ummm, scary, tense, or even legible, considering this is the point where the film devolves into people with cameras running around in the woods at night. And that's generally the biggest problem with the film: it's predictable, rote, unimaginative, and a whole bunch of other mean words. Early on, when a woman's talking head makes an appearance discussing the psychology of conspiracy theorists and how misguided they are, I said, "She's a plant! She's in on the conspiracy!" Tell me: do you think I'd be mentioning it right now if I wasn't entirely right? And then there's the ending, which I similarly called right away the very first time it was foreshadowed. I promise, this isn't me bragging; this is me explaining why I felt distinctly unmoved and left feeling quite cold after the credits rolled. It's bone dry, through and through.

*spoilers*

I also can't help but feel like the whole thing was an act of misdirection as well. The opening premise is never followed through explicitly, and that's not even the most egregious issue: the NWO is revealed at the end of the film to have hijacked our protagonist's documentary, which again, I called an hour earlier. It's just that this raises so many questions, none of which I think the film considered nor cared about in the slightest. If the Tarsus Club is so big and influential, being behind every major world event ever in the last few hundred years or so, why do they need to hijack a documentary from two random guys to spread their message? Why not hire Spielberg? What, would that be too suspicious? Surely nothing is worth your leader having to spend so much time with these two wild cards, giving endless interviews with them and coordinating a complex ritual to trap them and make them putty in your hands. Why not just kidnap them or something? And besides, if the film we are watching was the film they were making, it wouldn't have included all the stuff that shows that they sacrificed a man in cold blood in the name of a dead Roman religion, right? And so nobody should ever have to go through the footage and blur out everyone's face and disguise everyone's voice, right? It does make for a creepy final few minutes, though, I'll give the ending that much at least.

*end of spoilers*

While The Conspiracy does seem to be trying to avoid falling into outright Blumhouse fodder territory, it ultimately squanders some fascinating ideas that could have made for an interesting horror film. Once you see where the film goes and realize how uninteresting it is, it's like your brain tries to immediately begin evacuating itself of any and all information about it, and I'm left already feeling hazy on the whole thing. It was just so limp and played so broadly. With that being said, I'm surprised it isn't more popular than it is, given that that is exactly what most average film-goers would want to see if they bought a ticket to a conspiratorial found-footage horror film. It's just that I need a bit more to chew on in my films, and this ain't cutting it. Avoid unless you're extremely bored and are the world's biggest fan of the subgenre there's ever been, not that you'd be able to watch it anyway given its Shudder-exclusivity.