‘Noclip’ Review (FoundTV)

Stars: Gavin Charles, Alex Conn | Written and Directed by Gavin Charles, Alex Conn

For the past couple of months I have been enjoying the new app and streaming service ‘Found’. It covers, perhaps unsurprisingly, found footage movies. A good chunk of which are horror found footage movies. This particular genre of movie has been one of my favourites ever since seeing The Blair Witch Project at the cinema over twenty-five years ago, so I was thrilled to have access to a streaming service that covered this style of movie. With that in mind, I’ve decided to regularly review movies shown on ‘Found’ for Nerdly, and first up is Noclip.

Noclip is very simple in concept. It follows two filmmakers who set out on an adventure through a shopping centre (or mall as it is known in this film and America), as they kind of look for creepy goings-on and ‘liminal spaces’. And that is pretty much it.

There are plenty of moviegoers who will not get anything from this movie because it is just that for its one-hour runtime. Two guys walking around a shopping mall, occasionally chatting a little bit and smoking weed. The official line from the filmmakers is that this is a comedy horror, but I found very little to laugh about.

There is some stuff to enjoy though. I found the two lead actors, Gavin Charles and Alex Conn, to be very watchable. The pair also write/produce/direct/everything else in the movie, so clearly everything here is exactly how they wanted it to be. And although not a lot happens, I quite enjoyed following them around the mall and investigating each part of it.

The duo also managed to create that creepy atmosphere that was needed, just to make it anything like a horror movie. I would have liked to have seen and felt more of it, but there are times when the camera stays in spaces, and when you feel the characters start feeling a bit hopeless and lost, the viewer feels it with them. I would be very surprised if the filmmakers had not seen the movie Skinamarink because it feels like a very obvious influence. It doesn’t hit its highs anywhere near that film though.

For the last twenty minutes of the movie, the directors try to scare the audience by adding distortion to the sound and picture, but it did nothing for me. In fact, I found it quite annoying for the most part. At its worse, I couldn’t really see or hear what was happening on screen, and they add nothing when it comes to anything horror-related.

It’s hard to recommend Noclip because it has a very niche audience, but I’m sure the people who do like it will really like it. It was shown at a handful of small but popular film festivals, including Chattanooga and Panic Festival and got an unsurprising mixed response. If its brief description interests you, I’d give it a go. At only an hour long, it’s worth the gamble.

Noclip is available to stream now on Found.