Polterheist Review

Polterheist's leads (left to right): Boxy, Alice and Tariq - CREDIT: IMDb -

Polterheist is a comedy/crime thriller/horror (delete as appropriate) that has some people in it.

We first meet our two main characters, Tariq (Sid Akbar Ali) and Boxy (Jamie Cymbal), while they’re waiting to meet Tariq’s uncle who also happens to be a mob boss, to discuss money owed to the mobster. They don’t have this money though and they’ve killed the guy who did, so have to do, well, stuff for long enough to justify adapting the 2016 short into a feature.

Stuff that includes shooting, robbing then finding a psychic or something like that.

The end product feels like a filler episode of the TV show Misfits only without the engaging characters, terrific acting or funny moments.

It starts relatively well with an opening that manages to establish Boxy and Tariq’s personalities and motivations within five minutes or so, but the rest of the movie fails to explore anything set up in the early stages.

They are two morons, which the audience is seemingly supposed to find funny, played by two actors who maintain the same facial expression throughout the runtime – angry for Akbar Ali and worried for Cymbal – which are two issues emblematic of the entire film: there is nothing to latch onto.

They make the characters exclusively nasty – they’re gangsters, after all – but not one of them is conveying a message that is remotely interesting and what I believe was supposed to be satire commenting on the stupidity of some small-time criminals, has already been done in Seven Psychopaths. Boxy, the heart of the piece, is so dull that his development was telegraphed from the first minute.

A lack of subtlety also nullified a punchline about a character called Lucy, that was being built up for most of the film but was so blatant that I couldn’t believe they were dragging it out for so long.

- CREDIT: IMDb -

What was supposed to set Polterheist apart from your standard criminal comedy was the supernatural element that serves to be nothing other than a gimmick to allow for plot contrivances to make in-world sense. They quickly abandon the horror aspects for no reason other than because they didn’t need the film to have it anymore.

One redeeming factor of squeezing otherworldly aspects into it was the performance from Jo Mousley who plays Alice, a psychic possessed by Boxy and Tariq’s murder victim. The nature of the role allowed for her to show a bit of range and she really goes for it, giving the overblown melodrama expected of a film called bloody Polterheist.

Polterheist is streaming on Amazon Prime.