Director/Screenplay – Matt Mitchell, Producers – Clare Pearce, Photography – Jamie Burr, Music – Adam Price, Visual Effects – Gary Mellor of Bluespec Digital Media, Special Effects/Makeup Effects – Jess Heath, Production Design – Lucy Gahagan. Production Company – Lost Eye Films/Goldfinch Entertainment.
Cast
Harriet Madeley (Grace), Michael Fatogun (Sergeant Davies), James Barnes (Johnson), Lewis Saunderson (Lieutenant Taylor), Sophie Miller-Sheen (Maddie), Connor Williams (Private Matthews), Sarine Sofar (Bell), Marcus Bronzy (Adam Lawrence), Kevin Leslie (Steve), Laura Swift (Frances), Sally Philips (The Suited Woman), Adrian Edmondson (The Interviewer), Julian Rhind-Tut (Blast Door Scientist), Stephen Marcus (The Executioner)
Plot
A group of five urban explorers venture into a bunker but are soon experiencing strange phenomena including noises and apparitions. At the same time, a unit of soldiers under the command of Sergeant Davies are ordered to enter the bunker. The soldiers come under attack by creatures in the tunnels. Both groups begin to experience flashbacks to the original experiments held there that succeeded in opening a doorway and unleashing something.
The Rizen (2017) was the third film from British director Matt Mitchell. The film ventured into Lovecraftian Horrors as a group of people woke up in an underground facility where they were hunted by various monstrous things. Prior to that, Mitchell had also made Gangsters, Guns and Zombies (2012) and It Never Sleeps (2014), all on low budgets. Mitchell and a couple of actors from the first film return for more of the same with The Rizen: Possession.
I wasn’t much of a fan of The Rizen. It had potential but Mitchell was never too clear about what was going on. In fact, the principal issues you could complain about both The Rizen films is that Mitchell never gives us much in the way of explanations. Not far into the film here, he has a bunch of soldiers shooting at something they believe is there, not even being sure there is anything there at all – and that seems a perfectly apt metaphor for the film itself. It is a film where the characters are engaged in a great deal of running around, fighting against ‘something’ – it is never clear if the rizen are zombies or are possessed. It is a film where Matt Mitchell generates reasonable atmosphere but one that is entirely lacking in any substance beneath that – it is a house built on sand, lacking any explanatory framework.
(l to r) Harriet Madeley, Marcus Bronzy, Sophie Miller-Sheen and Kevin Leslie in the labyrinth
All that is happening ties back to a series of experiments, which at least give more explanations eventually about what is going on than the first film ever did – about a portal having been opened unleashing some kind of Lovecraftian entities. For some reason that is never given adequate explanation all of the characters in the film have flashbacks where it is revealed that they were scientists at the original experiment – this seems interestingly odd but crucially we never find out why.
There is the occasional scene where Mitchell creates some effect. There was one fine image right at the start that holds an unexpected jolt where one of the girls is looking at a device she is holding and a ghostly figure appears right in front of her a matter of inches away from her but then disappears by the time she looks up, not noticing anything untoward.
