‘Man Finds Tape’ VOD Review
Stars: John Gholson, Christine V. Hall, Nell Kessler, Mia King, William Magnuson, Judy McMillan, Kelsey Pribilski, Graham Skipper, Brian Villalobos | Written and Directed by Paul Gandersman, Peter S. Hall
Found footage is a crowded space, but Man Finds Tape at least comes armed with an idea. This 2025 mockumentary-style horror starts out feeling like vintage Stephen King small-town unease before veering hard into something far more cosmic and Lovecraftian by the back half. Whether that shift works for you will largely dictate how much patience you have for what follows.
Man Finds Tape centres on siblings Lucas and his estranged sister, reunited when Lucas discovers a strange tape in their parents’ barn. The footage appears to show Lucas as a child, visited at night by an unseen presence. When he uploads it, the clip somehow catapults him into viral conspiracy theory fame. Around the same time, the town is gripped by a disturbing phenomenon: people freezing mid-action, collapsing into trances, sometimes with fatal consequences, and later remembering nothing. Stranger still, anyone who tries to watch footage of these incidents blacks out themselves – except the sister, who left town years earlier.
There’s no denying the originality here. The mystery is compelling, the atmosphere suitably off-kilter, and the escalation from grounded weirdness into full-blown cosmic horror is genuinely intriguing. Some of the later ideas are nasty in concept, if not explicitly gory, and the grainy, low-res footage lends the grotesque moments a queasy edge. Performances are understated but solid, doing enough to sell the material without tipping into found-footage histrionics.
That said, the film’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Man Finds Tape is deliberately vague, sometimes effectively so, sometimes frustratingly. The central conceit doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. The “viral” tape itself is oddly mundane, making its explosive online impact hard to buy, while the rules around who can and can’t watch footage raise questions the film has no interest in answering. Suspension of disbelief is required, but the film asks for a lot of it.
The narrative also feels overlong. There’s a natural ending point that the film sails straight past, lingering for another ten minutes without adding meaningful insight or tension. By the time the credits roll, you’re left with more questions than answers. Still, for all its flaws, this is a refreshingly different take on found footage, with ideas you don’t see every day. Just don’t expect clarity or closure.
**½ 2.5/5
Ambitious, unsettling, and original, Man Finds Tape is on digital platforms – in the UK – from today, 19th January.
