After a riveting start, this film goes through tonal whiplash and strange directions, mishandling hard subject matter without any consideration or respect beyond exploitation. This is a film that mistakes noise for depth and shock for meaning, unable to provide substantive elements of either. Accusing a horror film of being in poor taste is laughable, considering the pedigree that has delivered us gems like the Human Centipede and a Serbian Film, and while nowhere near as bad, it certainly isn’t good. The subject matter goes for atrocities: a buffet of taboos and familial horror. Honestly, it is not as bad as it sounds, all executed rather bland and cheaply, even the copious gore seems dollar store. The creature design is… passable, a Nosferatu-Orc, the Temu version of an Insidious demon, until it gets some CG augmentation, in which case it degenerates into comedic. There are a handful of effective scares strewn throughout, but you have to suffer through disjointed storytelling, bad writing, and aggressively loud direction. On the plus side, it is short and relentlessly paced, but by the end, it is impossible to tell exactly what this film wants to be. It lampshades that the true demon is generational trauma, but, is it a demon possession? Is it a slasher? Is it tragic? Is it comedic? The film flits between notions and tone like a meth-addled squirrel then ends rather abruptly. In the hands of better writers, there could be a good film here, but as it stands this is noise aspiring towards substance.
Traumatika (2025)