Nerdly » ‘Advent’ Review

22nd Nov2024

‘Advent’ Review

by Alain Elliott

Stars: Rasina Alexander, Mark Arnold, Nicholas Vince, Cory Peterson, Marina Lazaris, Zee West, Cian Lorcan | Written and Directed by Airell Anthony Hayles

As a lover of all things Christmas, and therefore Christmas horror, I’ve always thought there could be a decent genre film based on the advent calendar. And indeed a movie came out just a couple of years ago called exactly that – The Advent Calendar – which was pretty good. This year, though comes Advent, with a slightly different tale to tell.

This one involves a ‘Krampus Calendar’. Something I didn’t know existed, and I assume is made up for the movie but at least it’s an original concept of sorts. It runs very similar to an Advent, where the character opens up a different door for each day in December. Only behind each door is a ‘task’. Tasks that seem to get more dangerous as the month goes on.

I quite liked this idea but the main problem in it is that the writer seems to run out of ideas pretty quickly. For whatever reason, several of the tasks seem to involve our character walking around the Christmas tree. I understand that each day had to kind of build up slowly until its final conclusion, but many of them are not very exciting at all.

Now why is this character doing all this you might ask? She is a Youtuber who, with a friend and cameraman, researches myths, folklore and ghosts, in the hope of catching something exciting a scary on camera. But with about 100 subscribers, she is desperate to find something that will send her viral. That in itself is quite a nice subject to tackle and the filmmakers do that well. What exactly will the modern social media creator/Youtuber do to become famous?

Because of the style of the movie, this is shot found-footage style and that works just fine. We also get one talking head, a character that knows the protagonist well. Normally having just the one talking head would not work, and there definitely should have been more BUT, the one talking head is played by Nicholas Vance who played the Chattering cenobite in the first two Hellraiser movies. He is excellent in his role and brilliant to watch and listen to every time he is on screen. Thankfully, he gets a decent amount of screen time too.

In the lead role I thought Rasina Alexander was really good, especially as this seems to be just her second-ever movie role. She seems to absolutely understand the type of character she is. A slightly annoying Youtuber desperate for fame and goth/alternative female who wants everyone to know how ‘strange’ they are. It’s not a character you can necessarily root for very easily but it works well anyway. Cian Lorcan is enjoyable as the friend/cameraman also. Both should have bright futures.

The low budget here does show a little but adding a found footage does help with that. We do get a couple of decent scares too. I enjoyed the conclusion of the film, satisfying and a little thought-provoking aswell. There’s plenty of horror fans who will enjoy this, none more so than me, a fan of Christmas horror and found footage movies. Definitely one to check out this December.