Incarnate is a story about a mother and her son. After a night of getting groceries, our family decides to get some rest until the boy named Cameron (David Mazouz) is attacked by a homeless demon named ‘Maggie’. We later jump to our protagonist named Dr. Ember (Aaron Eckhart) who is in the dream of a man possessed by a demon. Dr. Ember saves the man’s body from the demon by waking him up from his dream and killing it. When he awakens we discover that Ember is actually a quadriplegic with a massive drinking problem. He is an ‘incarnate’ with the ability to enter people’s subconscious and ‘evict’ demons from their bodies. So when the opportunity arises, he gets his chance at revenge against the demon that took his family away from him.
A little production background for context: Incarnate was directed by Brad Peyton (the San Andreas guy) from a script by Ronnie Christensen. It was produced by Jason Blum under the Blumhouse banner along with Trevor Engelson and Michael Seitzman, with additional involvement from WWE Studios and IM Global. The cast is led by Aaron Eckhart as Dr. Seth Ember, with Carice van Houten as Lindsay Sparrow, Catalina Sandino Moreno as Camilla, David Mazouz as the possessed kid Cameron, Keir O’Donnell, Matt Nable as the dad, plus supporting turns from Emily Jackson, John Pirruccello, Mark Steger as the demon Maggie, and others. Budgeted at around $5 million, it runs a tight 87 minutes and hit theaters on December 2, 2016 via BH Tilt and High Top Releasing, eventually scraping together about $9 million worldwide. None of that production muscle manages to paper over the thin storytelling.
The premise of Incarnate is actually a pretty creative one. The film puts a lot of work into creating its own science when it comes to Ember’s demonic evictions. When he is in the dream world, time never changes, giving away that the world they are in is not real. The possessed person has the ability to manifest their own exit from the dream to wake up. The film is basically Inception meets Constantine in terms of the central story. However, the creativeness of the film runs dry after that point as they try to create a competent film based solely on an idea and not much else. There isn’t much else to this film because for one, it’s short and two, it’s trying to stretch an interesting idea into an 85-minute film and barely has enough material to pull it off.
The film isn’t very scary. There is one startling moment at the beginning of the movie and it’s a random loud noise to catch you off guard. Clichés are pasted throughout, from an abusive father to a supernatural redemption story. The runtime doesn’t allow you enough time to connect emotionally with the characters. Eckhart’s character is the only one who gets enough screen time to feel anything for him. Everyone else isn’t given character development outside of a job title or a one-sentence description of who they are. While I don’t mind false endings, a film like this makes it feel like a waste of time. The monster lives after all the events, leading to an ending that goes out like an engine backfire. Incarnate is an interesting premise that would have better performed as a Netflix series instead of a feature-length film. In what should have been a supernatural horror film feels more like a comic-book origin movie with no way to turn a good idea into a good movie. While it is more entertaining than many other films in the Blumhouse library, at the end of the day, Incarnate doesn’t have the story to pull off its own ideas.
1/5
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