Canada. 2023.
Crew
Director – Micheal Bafaro, Screenplay/Producers – The Michaels [Micheal Bafaro & Michael Mitton], Photography – Atha Merrick, Music – Matt Dauncey & Phil Western, Visual Effects Supervisor – Peter Warkentin, Special Effects Supervisor – Geoff Ingeberg, Mannequin Designed by Ray Lai, Set Designer – Giantito Burchiellaro. Production Company – Industryworks Studios/Supersonic International.
Cast
Kelly Bastard (Frankie), Colm Hill (Steve King), Michael Mitton (Jonah), Rene Lai (Lucy), Aby Dukuly (Drake), Jason Haney (Lewis), Brittany Pilgrim (Lucy), Sophie Thom (Madison), Vanessa Nostbakken (Molly), Micheal Bafaro (Victor Malick)
Plot
In the town of New Colorado in New Jersey, criminals hijack a delivery truck only to be killed by what is inside. One of the group flees the scene only to be hit and run down by Frankie on her way home. In the aftermath, Frankie finds that she is haunted by a sinister mannequin. Her friends then see the mannequin and start to be killed as it begins to haunt them. They realise the only way that they are safe is if they do not look away from it.
Canadian director Micheal Bafaro has been a prolific genre voice since the early 2000s. After writing a few screenplays, Bafaro made his directorial debut with the low-budget heist film For a Few Lousy Dollars (1998), followed by the science-fiction film Sleeping Dogs (1998). Almost all of his work since has been in the horror genre with the likes of The Barber (2002), 11: 11 (2004), Cranes (2006), The Cycle (2009), Rise of the Damned (2011), Embedded (2012), Wrecker (2015), Amber’s Descent (2020), Flu (2020), the non-genre MyPhone (2022) and 5G: The Reckoning/Ascension (2023). Bafaro can also be seen on screen here in the role of the blind man that comes seeking to stop the mannequin.
Micheal Bafaro has a reasonable body of films going back to the 1990s and could be considered a prolific genre director. He has a surprising lack of profile though. And it could well be that this is because none of his films are very good. In fact, it continues to baffle me as to how it is that he manages to attract money to make more of them.
Like most of Bafaro’s films, Don’t Look Away is cast with names that you have never heard from before and probably never will again. It is shot exactly like a standard teen horror, the sort of which appear on Netflix by the bucketload – see the likes of Countdown (2019), Polaroid (2019) or Tarot (2024). And it has an entirely generic Don’t – title, which was big in the 1970s after Don’t Look Now (1973) and has seen a resurgence in recent years with the likes of Don’t Speak (2015), Don’t Breathe (2016), Don’t Fuck in the Woods (2016), Don’t Knock Twice (2016), Don’t Kill It (2016) and Don’t Worry Darling (2022), among others.
Don’t Look Away is a generic film. There is the odd moment that Micheal Bafaro seems on the verge of discovering something stylish – like the scene where Rene Lai discovers a dancefloor covered with dead bodies. However, there is one idea that kills the film dead – a killer mannequin. There have been assorted works about mannequins coming to life – The Twilight Zone episode The After Hours (1960), and the inane romantic comedy Mannequin (1987), but these have been in a light fantasy vein – or the Swedish film The Doll (1962), which sat in an interesting place of psychological ambiguity.
The nearest one can think of is the spate of films about killer ventriloquist’s dummies – The Devil Doll (1964), Magic (1978) et al. The teenagers followed by some type of curse that kills their way through the group is a familiar plot in everything from Final Destination (2000) and sequels and It Follows (2014) through to Truth or Dare (2018). Although if anything the idea of the killer mannequin that only moves when nobody is looking reminds of Doctor Who (2005- )’s The Weeping Angels.
There are a surprising number of Stephen King references throughout. The improbably named Kelly Bastard has a boyfriend named Steve (Colm Hill) and when we get a closeup on a package label, we find his surname is King. There are audio scenes of what sound like The Shining (1980) playing on a tv in the background, while the reference is made blatant in a scene where Kelly comes across Colm’s thesis where we see hundreds of pages of the word ‘mannequin’ typed over and over.
Trailer here