The premise is that filmmaker Maggie Price (played by Alba, who runs on empty in every scene until you forget she's the main) takes her crew to investigate a Jim Jones-esque massacre from 25 years ago, along with the lone survivor of the killing, Sarah Hope (played by Lily Rabe straddling general boredom and genuine creepiness). What Maggie forgets to mention to Sarah until THE DRIVE UP THERE is that she has a personal stake in this: her father was the lead agent in the FBI sting, and he killed himself some months later, "tearing their family apart".
The rest of the crew is made up of obviously future-dead people, so here's how I remember them: Christian, Maggie's soon-to-be-dead brother whose actor gives a performance that is both sleepy and subtle; Matt, the dead practical one; Nick, the dead asshole played by Dan Egan, so he has maybe two funny lines before death; Ann, the dead whiny one; and Jill, the dead annoying one. There's also Ed the grip.
This is my first problem with the movie. Other than those generalizations of the characters, I could not tell you anything else about them, and I don't really care to. I know horror films haven't tried to make you care about the dead meat in about two decades, but this film doesn't even try. Instead of allowing the audience some time to relate to the characters and be, y'know SAD when they die, we instead watch multiple-angle tapes of cult leader Jim Jacobs (Thomas Jane in a divisive performance that I'm going to say errs on the side of goofy) doing cult things.
The film essentially aims to explore one question: What if Jim Jones was totally right about whatever nonsense he was spouting at the time and it was the government that wrongly killed hundreds? That is not a question I would choose to entertain, but if done well, I could suspend my disbelief and discomfort with it. But the film makes the fatal flaw of introducing a supernatural bent in the third act. It turns out the cult was right and learned to basically astral project their souls, but they were interrupted when the Price siblings' father burst in, killing them all unintentionally.
This movie simply did not need to be supernatural in the slightest. It had definite legs in being an honest suspense horror that instead explored how cultist ideologies affect its victims, how suicide affects families, and how we perceive cults as intrinsically "wrong".
Instead, I was left with endless questions. How did every member of the cult achieve the "three nails" needed to gain full astral projection? Some were children who definitely would not have the discipline to do this, and yet they all take the poison together. Also, they expected one woman to revive all of them after six minutes but before a single person died?
What happens to the crew's souls when they're killed and taken over? The person in Christian's body says he's "not here anymore" but within two lines of dialogue Sarah says "who wouldn't want eternal life?" to appeal to Maggie and then at the end Jacobs in a new body says they're going to eat souls and make an immortal army (???), so are their souls in purgatory,are they completely gone, or have they passed through the veil? Sarah also does her "they're not dead; he'll bring them back" spiel when surrounded by the crew's bodies at the end, so are they next in line for the resurrection train? If so, why not just resurrect them in their own bodies?
Was there an FBI investigation after the sting? If not, why not and has the person who didn't sign off on an investigation get justly fired? If so, why didn't they scour every ounce of land that was owned by the cult? Sarah leads them to a hidey-hole with invaluable tapes that further the plot, but the fact that it was "hidden" doesn't mean much. A real investigation into a crime of this proportion would have had FBI boots on every pebble, river, and ramshackle structure that was on Jacobs's land and maybe even the land surrounding it.
Besides character and plot flaws, the direction is somewhat unmemorable, the special effects were passable, and the cinematography of dirty sadness that every horror cinematographer likes right now is getting old. Perhaps the best part of this film was the length. It was a standard 90 minutes, but it felt like half that time. Maybe I went into a fugue during most of the bickering between the crew and that shortened the time for me.
This film is mostly just sad to me because it really had a lot of potential but chose to take a route for which it wasn't interested in explaining the rules behind, and this frustrated me more than anything. If the found footage bits were a) significantly shortened and b) only from one angle, the way they should be; if the characters and their motivations or at the very least more personality traits were more dynamic and better defined; if the supernatural angle was removed and replaced with a sense of dread and shock that this man really had an innocent group of people (and maybe even himself) fooled; then maybe The Veil would have been a better movie.
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